The flow is data: typed stages, free composition, inheritance
Stages have a type the platform knows how to render and act on; flows compose them freely and are resolved down a chain — platform, account, workspace, project, demand. No conditionals, no rules language: a flow is data a loader reads.
What was on the table
The human↔agent development flow is configurable per account, workspace, project and even demand. The cockpit and the agent must operate any flow without knowing a specific one. The references sit at the extremes: task trackers customise only statuses; CI systems are flow-as-code for a machine; BPMN models everything at the cost of an analyst.
The paths we weighed
Fixed platform stages. Rejected: accounts work differently, and typed stages make the fixed case a particular flow.
A workflow engine — BPMN, Temporal. Rejected for v1: conditionals and parallelism nobody asked for.
Flow as code, a YAML per repository. Rejected as the primary interface; the audience is a developer on a screen.
What we chose, and why
Stages have a semantic type; flows are compositions. The type vocabulary belongs to the platform — context, spec, plan, implementation, test, human validation, finalisation, generic — and the type decides the renderer in the cockpit and the agent’s behaviour. A new type is a platform change; a new composition is not.
The structure is deliberately small: a name, a version, stages with a
key, a type, artifacts, a gate, and optionally actions. An artifact is a
file in the project’s knowledge repository. Stage actions — what the
platform does when a demand enters or leaves a stage — come from a closed
vocabulary (open_attention, close_attention, send_email,
provision_bench) with flat parameters: a declaration, not a program.
Resolution with inheritance: platform, account, workspace, project,
demand — the nearest declared level wins, and the interface shows where
the effective flow came from. A demand freezes the flow’s version when
it starts; stage progress is an event. A flow may be promoted to a higher
level by a holder of manage. Content resources like flows are open
within an organization by default; resources with credentials are closed.
What it cost
The inheritance chain requires the “inherited from” trail. External sharing of flows between accounts stayed out of v1, recorded as strategic. The syntax of the executable criteria inside the spec artifact is defined in the workflow spec.
Since then
Artifacts got their address in the knowledge repository on 2026-09-03, and stage actions were added on 2026-09-06 — both inside the structure, both keeping the flow data rather than code.