You Should Not Need a New Format for Workflows

Development plane. You should not need a new format for workflows. Python FTW.

A multi-agent workflow is usually a handful of agents and one loop. Today's frameworks make you express it through their own objects: nested wrappers, graphs and edges, crews and tasks, routing by string match. The result is hundreds of lines of orchestration before a single prompt or tool, and a different few hundred for every framework. The same workflow in plain Python is one file per agent and a short workflow file you can read top to bottom. Plain Python is neutral, importable into anything, understandable and timeless.

The development plane stays yours. CanyonOS runs plain Python: agents are ordinary classes in ordinary files and the workflow is a program. There are no framework objects to learn and no code changes to make. One command, canyonos deploy, builds the images, launches the agents across machines and starts the dashboard; the only artefact added to your project is a small configuration folder, which is where the other planes live.

See the development plane in the product: Setup on canyonos.ai. The same argument, in one page with the other three planes: Why CanyonOS.

• Part 1. Why We Built CanyonOS
• Part 2. Development plane: You should not need a new format for workflows. Python FTW. (this post)
• Part 3. Scaling plane: Individual components of a workflow should scale to achieve the desired goals
• Part 4. Observability plane: Observability should be a by-product of inference
• Part 5. Governance plane: Governance should run concurrently with, and independently of, development