Why Agents Are Actually Workflows - Tony Kovanen, Mastra's Founding Engineer

What if agents and workflows aren't two different things — but the same thing? Abhi sits down with Tony Kovanen, Mastra's founding engineer, live in London, to explore the ideas behind Mastra's design. Tony co-created Next.js and was a core team member of Socket.IO before joining Mastra as employee number one, and here he explains why, inside Mastra, an agent is really just a workflow that loops. You'll learn why workflows first mattered when the models weren't good enough, why they're back as tasks get longer and more complex, and the three distinct aspects of durability — human-in-the-loop, resuming a multi-day agent run after a crash, and replaying a stream. Tony also demos a dynamic workflow that fans out ten agents in parallel to summarize every file in a codebase.