The past week has revealed an important shift in the AI builder world. With OpenAI’s release of AgentKit, a quiet consensus emerged: visual workflow orchestration matters. What once took months of code development can now be built in hours, showing that intelligence scales through coordination, not isolation.
At Dify, we have believed in this from the start. In the past two years, we have been building an open-source, production-ready platform around the same idea: real progress in AI comes not from singular agents but from systems where humans and intelligent components work together.
Different Tasks Need Different Hammers: Inside Dify's Agentic Workflow Philosophy
Throughout history, every leap in productivity has followed the same logic: connecting individual intelligence into coordinated systems. From the shipyards of Renaissance Venice to the moving assembly lines of Henry Ford, workflow has always been the invisible architecture that turns skill into scale. The principle remains unchanged; only the medium evolves.
Today, instead of craftsmen or machines, we orchestrate models, APIs, and agents, aligning diverse forms of intelligence to build things greater than any individual part. Yet much of today’s conversation still falls into a false binary: the belief that an all-powerful agent can handle every production task alone. In reality, autonomy without structure becomes chaos, while structure without autonomy becomes stagnation. The most effective systems balance both.
Different tasks need different hammers. Some rely on the predictability of structured flows; others thrive on the adaptive reasoning of agents. The most powerful systems combine the two, with workflow discipline guiding agentic flexibility. This is the essence of the Agentic Workflow—a space where intelligence meets coordination, and where human intention and machine intelligence collaborate as one.
It is not a feature race or a short-term competition. It is a paradigm shift, and it is the space Dify has been quietly building for the past two years.
Beyond Developers: for the Builders of all Backgrounds
If the last decade of software was defined by code, the next will be defined by how we build with intelligence. At Dify, we have never been obsessed with binaries like high-code or low-code, agent or workflow. These are tools, not identities. What truly matters is how people think, collaborate, and create.
The launch of OpenAI’s AgentKit confirms the paradigm we have believed in all along: visual workflow orchestration matters. It shows that building intelligent systems is no longer about what models can do, but how people work with them. AgentKit introduces Agent Builder, ChatKit, and Connector Registry, making the development process more visual and connected. Yet it still mainly speaks to developers.
Dify aims broader—a world where everyone can build intelligent systems. It is designed to make the process intuitive and powerful. We have seen how creators, from first-time builders to experienced developers, need tools that adapt to how they think and work. Instead of enforcing one way to build, Dify provides flexible layers that evolve with the user. Whether starting small, refining complex logic, or collaborating in real time, Dify keeps every step simple, transparent, and scalable.
This design comes to life through three principles: Simple to Start, Powerful to Grow, and Built to Create Together.
Simple to Start, Grow Deep
The workflow canvas in Dify is a shared space for thought, where collaborators can directly see how ideas, data, and models interact. It turns abstract logic into something visible and approachable, allowing users to create, adjust, and iterate without technical barriers.
Dify is designed for progressive use — a building experience that deepens as users grow. Beginners can start with simple workflows or chatbots, while advanced users can unlock features such as variable binding, iteration, loops, monitoring, code nodes, and plugin integration. This layered design allows people from different backgrounds — product managers, domain experts, and developers — to work seamlessly on the same canvas.
For beginners:
Dify Agent
Dify Chatflow (with simple logic)
One-click publishing and seamless web integration
Publishing a Web application in one-click
Out-of-the-box embeddable iframe of Dify WebApp
For advanced users:
Dify supports various nodes for complex workflows, including:
logic nodes (loops, iterations), intent recognition nodes (question classifiers), knowledge retrieval nodes (RAG), data processing nodes (templates, variables), and agent nodes with custom strategies and tool calling.
Built-in monitoring integrates smoothly with Langfuse, LangSmith, Opik, etc.
The Dify Plugin Marketplace offers model providers, tools, data sources, agent strategies, and extensions — everything needed for AI app development.
This approach ensures both ease of learning and depth of expansion, allowing the product and its users to grow together.
Powerful to Grow, Built for Clarity
As projects scale and logic becomes more complex, Dify never collapses into visual clutter. It empowers developers to reclaim control — to deconstruct complexity rather than conceal it.
When integrating with external systems, users can connect through MCP or even publish a workflow as an MCP service. Developers can also extend agent capabilities using the Dify Plugin SDK (open-sourced on GitHub) to create reusable modules for others.
For those managing sophisticated RAG pipelines, Dify enables transformation of unstructured data into high-quality contextual knowledge. And when a workflow’s logic does not require reuse, developers can write custom Python or JavaScript directly within a secure, sandboxed code node.
Dify does not hide complexity; it deconstructs it — providing clarity without limiting capability.
Built to Create Together
Creating AI applications is never a solo act. Behind every great intelligent system lies imagination and precise coordination — a blend of diverse ways of thinking.
To make collaboration efficient and secure, Dify provides enterprise-grade collaboration features. Shared workspaces include role-based access control (RBAC) with four distinct roles to ensure order and accountability. The Dify Enterprise Edition (Dify EE) extends this further with multi-workspace setups and advanced authentication.
Cross-workspace and cross-organization collaboration is equally seamless. Workflows can be exported as DSL files for easy sharing and imported by other teams. Enterprise-level compliance — including audit logs and authentication — keeps collaboration transparent and reliable.
Whether brainstorming ideas, tuning prompts, or building plugins, Dify enables everyone to contribute on the same canvas, building together intelligently.
A Reliable Visual Agentic Workflow Platform Matters
As Dify has grown, one belief has become clear: to help people build truly production-ready AI systems, the platform itself must rest on three essential pillars — visual clarity, agentic workflow, and reliability.
These principles aren’t just features; they are the foundation of how intelligence can be built, trusted, and scaled.
Visual: Making Thought Visible
Human collaboration begins with seeing.
A visual workflow transforms abstract reasoning into something tangible — a shared space where teams can understand, discuss, and refine ideas together.
When the logic of intelligence becomes visible, it becomes easier to trust, accelerating communication and coordination across both humans and machines.
Agentic Workflow: A More Pragmatic Way to Build
The myth of an all-powerful black box remains just that — a myth.
Real-world systems demand a balance between flexibility and structure, between autonomy and predictability.
An agentic workflow embraces this balance.
It allows intelligent components to act independently while remaining part of a coherent, observable process. This is a more pragmatic way to build — one where systems can evolve and be understood, explore and be reused.
Reliability: The Foundation of Trust
Reliability means more than stability; it means control over process and predictability of outcome.
A trustworthy platform must be:
– Secure, with least-privilege access, authentication, encryption, and sandboxing.
– Observable, with clear logs, traces, and real-time execution visibility.
– Auditable and Transparent, with reproducible runs, version tracking, and verifiable logic.
– Scalable and Resilient, able to perform under load and recover gracefully.
– Governable, with structured multi-tenant management, plugin governance, and compliance at its core.
These three pillars define what it means to build with intelligence — not just faster, but better.
They turn complexity into coordination, and coordination into creation. This is the paradigm Dify has quietly embodied from the beginning: a open, model-neutral, reliable, visual, agentic workflow platform where intelligence is not hidden in code, but shared, understood, and built together.
Built for Everyone, Open to the Future
Dify is open-source and model-neutral. You can use any model on any system, whether cloud, desktop, or private network, with full transparency and control. The name “Do It For You” reflects a simple mission: to empower more creators to build with confidence.
By 2026, we will continue helping teams deliver stable, production-grade AI applications so that everyone, not just engineers, can create with intelligence. Because Dify is more than a workflow builder; it is a statement of belief that the democratization of intelligence begins with the democratization of creation.
