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 that can wait a week for a reply, resuming a three-day agent run after a crash, and replaying a stream from the beginning. Tony makes the case that durable-by-default isn't free, walks through how Mastra compiles workflows into a JSON step graph run by an interpreter, and demos a dynamic workflow he built that week in London: point it at a codebase, and ten agents fan out in parallel to summarize every file and roll it up — so it never misses a file and never poisons its context. Recorded live in London. 📚 ABOUT TONY Tony Kovanen on the Mastra blog: https://mastra.ai/authors/tony-kovanen 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Meet Tony Kovanen 00:57 The history of workflows vs. agents 02:26 Why agents are actually workflows 03:44 Durability: the three aspects 06:52 The "Opus moment" & dynamic workflows 07:08 Why big tasks still need workflows 08:56 How dynamic workflows work: the JSON step graph 10:02 Analyzing a codebase with parallel agents 10:58 Why this changes the game 12:27 Mastra vs. Claude's dynamic workflows 13:11 Favorite Mastra memories 14:08 Outro