Definition
Plain language
How information moves between steps in a program or computation.
As stated in the literature
In agent planning, the structure of how outputs of one tool or operation feed into inputs of the next, used in Agent JIT to identify which steps actually require LLM judgment versus deterministic code.
Why it matters: Understanding data-flow lets agent systems run independent steps in parallel and replace some LLM calls with plain code where no judgment is needed.
For example, in a plan that searches the web, summarizes results, and emails the summary, the data-flow shows the summarizer needs the search output but the emailer doesn't need to see the original query.
Heard on the show
“The best competitor — a data-flow defense called CaMeL — got it down to seventy-four percent.”Episode 105 — The Trojan Is Your Agent's Memory: Why Single-Step Defenses Miss Persistent Attacks