The agent chain

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How the chain runs

The agents you add to a workflow form an ordered chain. When a run starts, an orchestrating agent takes your workflow definition and drives it:

1. It reads your description as the goal of the whole workflow.
2. It walks the chain in declared order, spawning one agent at a time.
3. For each step it composes a briefing from the workflow’s intent, that agent’s role, what triggered the run (for a pull-request run: the PR number, head and base commits, the diff), and the relevant parts of earlier steps’ results.
4. It waits for each step to finish before starting the next.
5. When every step succeeds, it writes a short summary of what each step did and how the results chained together.

Steps never run in parallel. That’s the point of a chain — each step gets to see what the previous one produced.

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Passing results between steps

You don’t wire inputs and outputs together by hand. Each agent returns a summary of what it did, and the orchestrator quotes the relevant parts of that summary into later steps’ briefings verbatim. In practice this means a two-step chain works because the second agent is told what the first one found — for example, a scanner reports findings to a manifest, and the next agent is briefed on where that manifest is and what’s in it. What this does not do is let you transform or filter results between steps. If you need different handling, that belongs inside an agent, not between them.

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The briefing is why descriptions matter

Two descriptions shape every step’s briefing:

• The workflow’s description — quoted as the overall intent.
• Each agent’s description — reflected back at the agent to confirm its role.

A vague description on either produces a vague briefing. This is the most common reason a chain underperforms, and it’s usually fixed by editing prose rather than by changing agents. See writing an agent.

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Choosing agents

Any agent can be a step — Console’s or your own. Your organization’s agents appear in the picker alongside the built-in ones, and the orchestrator treats them identically.

• For what ships with Console and what each is for, see the agent library.
• To write your own, see writing an agent.

A few agents in the library are designed to be spawned by other agents rather than used as steps directly — noted here.

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Ordering

The rules of thumb:

• Broad before narrow. Discover first, then act on what was discovered.
• Expensive before dependent. If a step fails, everything after it is skipped — so put the step most likely to fail where it costs least.
• One step is a valid chain. A single scanner plus an output is a complete, useful workflow. Don’t add steps for symmetry.

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Common chains

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Editing a chain

In the workflow editor the chain is drawn left to right as pills with arrows:

• Add with the + button, which searches the agent library.
• Reorder by dragging a pill.
• Remove via the grip icon on a pill.

Between 1 and 20 steps.

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Next steps