In the world of software development, we're constantly seeking better ways to manage complexity. From monoliths to microservices, the goal has always been to build more reliable, scalable, and maintainable systems. The next evolution in this journey is here: agentic computing. This paradigm shifts our thinking from simple function calls to orchestrated, autonomous agents that perform complex business tasks.
Agentic workflows are about creating small, intelligent, and independent pieces of software—agents—that can be composed to accomplish a larger goal. Think of a lead scoring process, a customer onboarding sequence, or a financial transaction approval chain. Instead of a rigid, monolithic script, you have a flexible workflow driven by code-defined agents.
But building these autonomous systems comes with its own set of challenges: ensuring data integrity, managing state, handling errors, and orchestrating the flow between agents. How can we embrace the power of agentic computing without getting bogged down in boilerplate and infrastructure management?
The core principle behind building effective software agents is treating business logic as first-class, reliable services. This is a concept we call Business-as-Code. Instead of burying critical logic deep within a large application, you extract it into focused, standalone functions that act as agents.
This approach requires a new kind of platform—one that’s built for code-driven workflows. It needs to understand the contract of your function, guarantee its inputs and outputs, and handle the execution reliably every single time.
This is where a platform like Functions.do transforms the development experience. It provides the framework to turn your business logic into typesafe, production-ready APIs, letting you focus purely on the code that delivers value.
Let's see how simple it can be to create a powerful agent. Imagine you need a function to score new sales leads based on a few key data points. With a traditional setup, you'd be thinking about API endpoints, validation libraries, deployment scripts, and server configurations.
With an agentic platform, your focus is just on the logic. Here’s how you’d define and execute a scoreLead agent using the Functions.do SDK:
import { Function } from 'functions.do';
// Define the input type for your function (the contract)
interface Lead {
companySize: number;
industry: string;
hasBudget: boolean;
}
// Create a function agent with a unique name and version
const scoreLead = Function<Lead>('score-lead-v1');
// Execute the function with typesafe inputs
const { score, reason } = await scoreLead({
companySize: 250,
industry: 'SaaS',
hasBudget: true,
});
console.log(`Lead Score: ${score}/100 - ${reason}`);
In this example, scoreLead is more than just a function; it's an autonomous agent. The platform ensures that any data passed to it conforms to the Lead interface, abstracting away all the validation and infrastructure concerns.
To truly enable agentic computing, a platform must provide more than just a compute environment. It needs a robust set of features designed specifically for creating and managing code-driven workflows.
What does it mean for a function to be 'typesafe'? It means leveraging your TypeScript or other type definitions to automatically validate function inputs and guarantee the shape of the output. The platform acts as a gatekeeper, ensuring data integrity from end to end. This catches potential errors before runtime, dramatically improves developer productivity, and eliminates a whole class of bugs related to incorrect data formats.
A single agent is powerful, but their true potential is unlocked when they work together. An agentic platform must allow you to chain functions together to create complex workflows. For example, a new-customer-signup agent could trigger a send-welcome-email agent, which in turn schedules a setup-onboarding-call agent. The platform should manage the state, execution order, and error handling between these steps, allowing you to build sophisticated business processes with simple, composable code.
How is this different from AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions? While FaaS providers give you a serverless compute environment, an agentic workflow platform provides a complete, managed framework to turn entire business services into software. It abstracts away the underlying infrastructure, orchestration, API gateway configuration, and versioning. You deploy your function via an SDK, CLI, or Git integration, and the platform handles the rest, making it available as a secure, reliable API endpoint.
Agentic computing represents a fundamental shift in how we build and orchestrate business logic. By treating functions as autonomous, typesafe agents, we can build systems that are more resilient, easier to understand, and faster to evolve.
Platforms like Functions.do are at the forefront of this movement, providing the tools developers need to stop wrestling with infrastructure and start building powerful, code-driven workflows.
Ready to build your first autonomous agent? Explore how you can transform your business logic into reliable services at Functions.do.