Workflow

A workflow is the order and set of steps you go through to finish a task from beginning to end.

Think of a cooking recipe. There's a set order — wash, cut, cook, plate — and you have to follow that order to finish the dish. Getting a document approved at work is similar: you draft it, get it reviewed, get it approved, and send it out. This whole repeating flow of work is what we call a workflow.

The term comes up a lot when talking about AI tools, too. That's because AI can now carry out a whole sequence — writing code, running it, fixing errors, running it again — on its own, without a person giving instructions at every single step. So in recent articles, "workflow" is often used to mean that AI is now handling a sequence of tasks that people used to manage by hand, one step at a time.

In the article, OpenAI's coding tool Codex is described as demonstrating a "hands-free" workflow running across desktop and mobile. Here, "workflow" refers to the sequence of steps involved in writing, running, and checking code. It's easy to picture a workflow as some elaborate diagram or flowchart, but it really just refers to the ordered flow of work we repeat every day.

If you have a task you repeat often, try writing out the steps first. For example, ask an AI chatbot to do something like: "1) summarize the key points of this document, 2) draft an email based on that summary, and 3) polish the draft's tone to be more polite" — all in one request. You'll see the AI carry out the steps in sequence on its own.