What if the process is different depending on the case?

A codified workflow is a straight sequence. The steps run in order on every run. There is no fork you draw on a canvas, and no loop that sends a run back to step three.

Variation lives inside the steps instead. A codified step is a piece of code, so a rule with a dozen exceptions is a rule that step applies. The refund under a thousand and the refund above it can be one step that behaves differently in each case, and the walk-through is where you tell it which is which.

Where the difference needs judgement rather than a rule, the step stays agentic. You pin it during the walk-through and it keeps a model in the loop at run time: matching a payment to a customer whose name never quite matches, reading whether a message is a complaint or a question. Every agent step that survives into an autonomous workflow is a place the procedure could not be pinned down, so they are kept to the minimum. They exist for exactly this.

A case the workflow has genuinely never met is a different situation. That surfaces as a failure and opens the repair interview, which is the honest outcome. A guess would have been worse.