Workflow

The set route a piece of work travels: draft → review → verify → publish, with rules for what happens if a step fails or the work has to go back a stage.

Your quoting process. Site visit, measure, price it up, someone senior checks it, out it goes. It's written down, it always runs in that order, and everyone knows what happens when a number comes back wrong.

A pipeline is the stricter cousin: a workflow that only ever goes forwards. A workflow can branch and send work back a step; a pipeline can't.

Why it matters: the central design choice in orchestration is set route versus free-roaming agent — rails where mistakes are expensive, room to improvise where exploring pays. Most good setups are a set route with freedom inside the individual steps: the order is fixed, how each step gets done is not.

Related: Pipeline · Orchestration · Agent