Great parallel with the process modeling languages and thanks for sharing your thoughts on the deterministic vs probabilistic portion of the execution.
One additional thought is the Claude approach allows you to also define the workflow using with human language by describing a use case. With traditional modeling languages you needed the understanding of a specific formalism to define the workflow, which prevented the business users from correctly using the tool. Claude lowers that barrier, but it also risks of having the deterministic part defined by the probabilistic LLM as for bespoke workflows, you prompt and Claude tried to build the steps.
I run the engineering department for a company selling a BPMN-based workflow system for 10 years and despite our promise to bring the business user onboard in the development process, we never really managed as the business preferred to delegate to the engineers the understanding of the model notation. What we learned through all these years was the notation was only part of the story. The best engineers were leading the most successful implementations because they could manage the inherent complexity of the problem at hand. The incidental complexity introduced by the modeling notation was already relatively low and Claude will further lower it by allowing using natural human language. What we don't yet know if how well will Claude manage the inherent complexity without the structured thinking of an engineer when dealing with complex problems.
Great parallel with the process modeling languages and thanks for sharing your thoughts on the deterministic vs probabilistic portion of the execution.
One additional thought is the Claude approach allows you to also define the workflow using with human language by describing a use case. With traditional modeling languages you needed the understanding of a specific formalism to define the workflow, which prevented the business users from correctly using the tool. Claude lowers that barrier, but it also risks of having the deterministic part defined by the probabilistic LLM as for bespoke workflows, you prompt and Claude tried to build the steps.
I run the engineering department for a company selling a BPMN-based workflow system for 10 years and despite our promise to bring the business user onboard in the development process, we never really managed as the business preferred to delegate to the engineers the understanding of the model notation. What we learned through all these years was the notation was only part of the story. The best engineers were leading the most successful implementations because they could manage the inherent complexity of the problem at hand. The incidental complexity introduced by the modeling notation was already relatively low and Claude will further lower it by allowing using natural human language. What we don't yet know if how well will Claude manage the inherent complexity without the structured thinking of an engineer when dealing with complex problems.