Guides

Building workflows

A workflow turns a one-off agent run into a repeatable process — a sequence of steps that hand work to each other and can run on demand, on a schedule, or whenever another system calls. Every side-effecting step still passes the approval gate.

What a workflow is

A workflow is an ordered list of steps (up to 25). Each step runs one of your agents, using that agent's latest published version, so improving an agent improves every workflow that uses it. Give the workflow a name and an optional description, add steps, and save.

Building the steps

For each step you choose the agent and how it's fed:

• Input. Write a short template for the step's input, using {{previous_output}} to drop in what the step before produced. Or simply pass the previous step's full output straight through.
• Order & branches. By default steps run top to bottom, each receiving the one before. Give a step dependencies instead and SyftOS runs it as a graph: independent branches run in parallel, and a step waits only for the steps it actually needs.
• Conditions. A step can carry a condition, so a branch fires only when it should: run it only when a value equals, contains or exists (and the negatives).

Running it

A workflow runs three ways:

• On demand: press Run now on the workflow, optionally typing a starting prompt that seeds the first step.
• On a schedule: see below.
• From a webhook: when another system sends a request, see below.

Scheduling

Use the schedule builder: pick hourly, daily, weekly or monthly and a time of day, or drop to a raw cron expression if you need something specific. As you adjust it, SyftOS shows the next few run times so there's no guesswork.

Schedules fire against your organisation's timezone, with daylight saving handled for you, so "9am every weekday" stays 9am your time across the clock change. Set your timezone under Settings → Organisation first.

Webhook triggers

To run a workflow when something happens elsewhere, create a webhook trigger. You're given a URL and a signing secret (shown once — copy it then) and point your other system at it with an HTTP POST:

• Verified. Sign the request body with the secret (HMAC-SHA256) in the X-SyftOS-Signature header; unsigned or mis-signed calls are rejected.
• Safe to retry. Send an X-SyftOS-Idempotency-Key and a repeated delivery returns the first run rather than starting a second.
• Mapped. Pick a field of the JSON payload to use as the run's prompt, or pass the whole payload through.
• Protected & logged. Each trigger is rate-limited, and every call, accepted or rejected, is recorded in its activity history so you can see exactly what fired and why.

Budgets

A workflow can carry an optional budget: a cost or token cap with a warning threshold. When a cap is reached, new runs pause rather than overspend; runs already in flight always finish. It's a safety net for anything that runs unattended on a schedule or webhook.

Next steps