Thanks for the pointer! We briefly checked them out. Looks like they use a flowchart-style canvas - that’s great for certain types of automations.

Rowboat is especially designed for agentic patterns (e.g. manager-worker) which lend more autonomy to agents. Rowboat's copilot is empowered to organize and orchestrate agents flexibly, based on the nature of the assistant.

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KaoruAoiShiho 5 days ago | parent [-]

Can you give a specific example of something that can't be expressed with a flowchart but can be with rowboat.

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segmenta 5 days ago | parent [-]

In theory you could express most things as a flowchart but the complexity of doing that quickly escalates. A customer support bot that goes beyond informational answers might be a good example for something that is hard to express in a flowchart (without exploding complexity), but can be built in Rowboat.

Here is some personal experience: we previously built Coinbase's automated chatbot and we used a flowchart type builder to do that. This was a intent-entity based system that used deep learning models. It started great, but pretty quickly it became a nightmare to manage. To account for the fact that users could ask things out of turn or move across topics every other turn - we added in concepts called jumps - where control could go from one path to another unrelated path of workflow in on hop - which again introduced a lot of maintenance complexity.

The way we see it is that, when we assign a task to another human or a teammate we don't give them a flowchart - we just give them high level instructions. Maybe that should be the standard for building systems with LLMs?

Is this making sense?

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zoomzoom 5 days ago | parent [-]

Is the high level instruction compiled to a flowchart under the hood? If so maybe a conversational interface is another layer on a flowchart and not an alternative? Overall it makes sense that flowcharts are limiting when they get big, yes. Product looks cool congrats on the launch.

	▲	segmenta 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks! No, the instructions are not compiled into a flowchart under the hood. We use OpenAI’s agent SDK and use handoffs as a mechanism to transfer control between agents. There are 3 types of agents in Rowboat: 1. Conversational agents are ones which can talk to the user. They can call tools and can choose to handoff control to another agent if needed. 2. Task agents can’t talk to users but can otherwise call tools and do things in a loop - they are internal agents. 3. Pipeline agent is a sequence of task agents (here the transfer of control is deterministic). For instance, if we build a system for airline customer support, there might be a set of conversational agents each for different high level topics like ticketing, baggage etc. and internally they can use task and pipeline agents as needed. Does this make sense?