Agentic Workflow Patterns 1 · Who controls the control flow, you or the model?

[akash-coded]

Exercise 1: Foundations

Est. time: 15 min | Difficulty: warm-up | Patterns: v1 augmented, v2 chaining, v3 routing

Practice: MCQ, choose-an-option, fill-the-blank, match-the-primitive, complete-a-flowchart, spot-the-error, fix-code, predict-the-output.

Anchor booking for every task: PNR JX48Q2, surname Rao, Gold tier, BLR-DEL segment cancelled by the airline.

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Scenario

Tuesday, low tide. Priya, the ops lead, hands you the easy queue while the senior team preps for the weekend storm. Three tickets. Your job is not to build big. It is to pick the smallest thing that works.

The ladder, cheapest first: v1 augmented agent, v2 chaining, v3 routing.

The tickets:

• T1. "What's the status of my booking JX48Q2?" A lookup and a plain answer.
• T2. Every refund notice must run the same three steps, always in this order: verify identity, check fare rules, write the notice.
• T3. Inbound messages split cleanly into status, change, or refund. Each type wants a different specialist and different tools.

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Part A: Pick the pattern (MCQ)

Circle one per ticket.

Ticket	a	b	c
T1	Routing	Augmented agent	Swarm
T2	Prompt chaining	Routing	Augmented agent
T3	Routing	Chaining	Orchestrator-workers

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Part B: Choose the design, and say why

For T1, two designs land on your desk:

• Design 1: one Agent with the get_pnr tool.
• Design 2: a three-agent Swarm (lookup agent, backup agent, reviewer agent) with handoffs.

Pick one. In one line, say what the loser costs you that it does not buy back: ________

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Part C: Fill the blank

The only question under every pattern choice in this module is: who controls the ________ , you or the model?

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Part D: Match the primitive

Draw a line (or write the letter) from each need to the Strands tool that serves it.

Need		Strands primitive
1. One agent that can call tools		A. Swarm
2. A team of peers that hand off		B. GraphBuilder
3. A structured, auditable flow		C. Agent + @tool

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Part E: Complete the flowchart

Fill the two blank leaves with the right pattern name.

flowchart TD
    Start([New ticket]) --> Q1{Same steps, same order every time?}
    Q1 -->|Yes| L1[... fill L1]
    Q1 -->|No, depends on category| L2[... fill L2]
    Q1 -->|No, single lookup| A[Augmented agent]

Loading

• L1 = ________
• L2 = ________

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Part F: Spot the error, then fix it

Meera wires the model and gets on-demand throughput isn't supported on the first call.

from strands.models import BedrockModel

model = BedrockModel(
    model_id="anthropic.claude-haiku-4-5-20251001-v1:0",
    region_name="us-east-1",
    temperature=0.3,
)

• The one thing wrong: ________
• The corrected model_id: ________

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Part G: Fill the blank (code)

Complete the augmented agent for T1.

from strands import Agent, tool

travelmind = Agent(
    model=haiku,
    name="________",                      # any clear name
    system_prompt="Report flight status for a PNR. Verify identity first.",
    tools=[________],                      # which tool looks up a booking?
)

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Part H: Predict the output

The T3 router runs a cheap classifier that returns exactly one of: status, change, refund, baggage, complaint.

label = classifier("Rao here, JX48Q2. My flight was cancelled by the airline. Can I get a refund?")

• label will be: ________
• Which specialist runs next: ________

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Skeptic's corner

Priya asks: "Why not just point one big agent with every tool at all three tickets and skip the pattern talk?"

Give her two lines. One cost reason, one quality reason.