FlashScript: Compiling Recurring Agent Workflows into Reusable Neuro-Symbolic Programs
Organizations: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA · Microsoft, Redmond, WA
Abstract
Many agent tasks recur with new data or small changes, yet agents regenerate their reasoning and actions on each run, producing different results. Distilling a prior run into a skill helps the agent avoid earlier mistakes, but it still re-runs the full process each time, so runs can vary and incur that cost. We compile a successful agent run into a reusable neuro-symbolic program (NSP) with a set of guidelines we call FlashScript. Actions and data transformations become code, instance-specific values become parameters, and decisions that need model judgment become LLM calls. We identify three layers where these calls belong and three techniques that replace most of them with code. The compilation does not remove nondeterminism; it localizes it, so the deterministic program and its neural calls can be reviewed and tested separately. Across 120 WorkBench analytics tasks with Claude Haiku 4.5, the NSPs were correct and made identical tool calls on every run, using about 70 times fewer input tokens and a third of the runtime of a skill-guided agent whose runs were inconsistent. In a composite version of the tasks, the skill-guided agent's accuracy fell to 23%, and its output inconsistency increased, while the NSPs remained correct and identical across all runs. The NSPs successfully generalized to all 108 unseen instances of the same templates. Our findings suggest that NSPs from agent trajectories can be considered cumulative software assets for end-users to test, maintain, and reuse in their recurring workflows.
Figures & tables
| Agent | Agent + skill | NSP | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accuracy | 0.89 0.007 | 0.97 0.004 | 1.00 0 |
| Correct in all three runs | 0.79 | 0.96 | 1.00 |
| Same outcome as first run | 0.82 0.021 | 0.99 0.004 | 1.00 0 |
| Same tool calls as first run | 0.72 0.004 | 0.97 0.008 | 1.00 0 |
| Input tokens | 21,986 309 | 23,138 45 | 321 0 |
| Output tokens | 439 3.9 | 488 5.0 | 95 0.3 |
| R | T | R+T | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accuracy, same instance | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 |
| Accuracy, unseen instances | 0.89 | 1.00 | 1.00 |
| Accuracy, composite tasks | 0.53 | 1.00 | 1.00 |
| Same outcome, composite tasks | 0.99 | 1.00 | 1.00 |
| Runs that raise an error | 8.6% | 0% | 0% |
| Neural calls per run | 1.3 | 1.8 | 1.5 |
LLM Agent Workflow Optimization
LLM agent workflow optimization studies how to design and run multi-step agents for better task success, reliability, latency, and cost.
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