ControlFlow/Marvin/Prefect

[jbnitorum]

I'm a long time Prefect/Cloud user but just starting to look at ControlFlow and Marvin. From what I've read ControlFlow essentially sits on top of Prefect 3 and a ControlFlow flow is essentially the same as a Prefect flow and could be deployed to Prefect Cloud as such. I'd briefly looked at Marvin when it was first released and just appeared to be a lot of useful abstractions to make it easier to use AI APIs. Now I see with this latest version that Marvin and ControlFlow are combined in Marvin v3? Or will ControlFlow continue as standalone and this is just about adding some of the features of ControlFlow into Marvin?

With ControlFlow's @flow decorator being removed, am I to interpret that a Marvin Thread is not a Prefect Flow? I'm excited about starting to use ControlFlow and Marvin but I feel like I'm a little lost as to how best to deploy in production with Prefect (i understand Prefect isn't a requirement, but thats where we run all of our workflows). I feel like I need a Prefect/Marvin/ControlFlow Venn diagram....

[zzstoatzz]

hi @jbnitorum - marvin supersedes controlflow entirely, we could make that clearer in the README perhaps.

controlflow's inherent use of prefect caused issues for users who just wanted the friendly agentic DX, especially since it offered no built-in deployment strategies. In my experience it's easier to simply use marvin as a circumstantial python dependency in a prefect workflow / deployment - instrumenting AI things yourself as needed with prefect primitives.

tldr: if you were thinking about using controlflow, just use marvin.

[jbnitorum]

Got it... it looks like in marvin v3 basically marvin.run == controlflow.run. This makes sense. Control flow was a little confusing as a Prefect user because it wasn't clear if it should be used in lieu of a Prefect flow or inside of a Prefect flow. This is a little cleaner. Though I still think it would be beneficial to further clarify/demonstrate marvin usage within Prefect flows in the docs and how they can integrate. I get that marvin has a potential audience outside Prefect users/customers, but its still a good opportunity to help the already engaged Prefect users/customers incorporate marvin in their flows.