dynamic-workflows

name: dynamic-workflows description: Catalog of the native Workflow tool's 6 orchestration patterns (classify-and-act, fan-out-and-synthesize, adversarial-verification, generate-and-filter, tournament, loop-until-done) plus operational controls. Consult when designing multi-agent orchestration — how to fan out, verify at scale, loop until done, pick parallel vs pipeline, or compose patterns into a workflow. user-invocable: true

Dynamic Workflows

A workflow is a harness Claude writes for THIS task: a JS script that coordinates subagents. Each agent gets its own context (intermediate results stay out of the main conversation), its own model (sonnet for throughput, opus for judgment, and fable — Claude Fable 5 — for the hardest synthesis/verification stages where first-shot correctness or ambiguity-navigation dominates; fable costs ~2x opus, so reach for it stage-by-stage, not as a default), and its own isolation level (worktree or none). The structure — not better prompting — is what fixes three failure modes of long single-context work:

• Agentic laziness — declares done after partial progress. A loop with a stop condition keeps going.
• Self-preferential bias — can't fairly judge its own work. A separate verifier agent can.
• Goal drift — constraints quietly vanish after compaction. Constraints baked into each agent's prompt don't.

Core API

agent(prompt, {schema, label, phase, model, isolation})  // one subagent, structured output via schema
parallel([() => agent(...), ...])  // barrier: waits for ALL thunks before continuing
pipeline(items, stage1, stage2)    // streaming: each item flows stage-to-stage, no barrier
phase('Name'); log('progress')     // progress reporting
export const meta = {name, description, whenToUse, phases}  // required header block
// Forbidden inside workflow code: current-time APIs, random APIs, Node/filesystem access

Pick parallel vs pipeline by one question: do I need ALL results before the next step? Yes (synthesis, dedup, ranking) → parallel barrier. No (each item is independent end-to-end) → pipeline streams.

The 6 patterns

classify-and-act — a cheap classifier routes work before anything does it: triage the input, then send each item down the right branch with the right model. Use when inputs vary in complexity and you want to spend the expensive model only where complexity demands it.

fan-out-and-synthesize — one agent per enumerable independent item (file, module, research angle), then a synthesize barrier merges the results. The dominant pattern; reach for it whenever the work splits into independent pieces and the answer needs all of them.

adversarial-verification — a separate skeptic agent tries to refute each finding against an explicit rubric. The verifier sees only the rubric and the artifact — never the producer or its reasoning — so it can't be charmed into agreement. Use whenever the producer's output feeds a decision; this is the structural fix for self-preferential bias.

generate-and-filter — generate wide and commit late: many candidates first, then filter and dedup by an explicit rubric. Use for brainstorming, naming, and solution design, where the first idea is rarely the best and judging is cheaper than generating.

tournament — N attempts compete; a judge compares them PAIRWISE, because comparative judgment beats absolute scoring for taste and ranking. The bracket lives in deterministic loop code; agents only do the comparisons. Use when "which is best" matters more than "is this good".

loop-until-done — for work of unknown quantity (find all X, sweep until clean). The stop condition is a state of the world — no new findings two rounds running, logs clean — never a fixed pass count. Dedup each round against ALL findings seen so far, or the loop never converges.

Composition

Real workflows compose 2-4 patterns. Map the failure mode you fear to the pattern that prevents it:

Worked examples ship in the cc_tool repo under .claude/workflows/:

• model-recalibration-audit.js — fan-out research + per-component analysis with adversarial verification, wired as a pipeline.
• ship-pipeline.js — model-tiered pipeline: Opus plans and reviews, Sonnet codes and tests, structured hand-offs between stages.
• loop-until-clean.js — loop-until-done sweep (stop after two dry rounds) + adversarial verification of survivors.

Treat them as templates to adapt, not scripts to run verbatim — copy one into your project's .claude/workflows/ to adapt it.

Operational controls

• Pair loops with /goal for a hard completion target. Without it, workflows stop at soft completion — "looks done" instead of "is done".
• /loop runs the whole workflow on a recurring schedule.
• Set an explicit token budget in the prompt. Ambitious workflows balloon 5-10x past the naive estimate; the budget is the only brake.
• Quarantine untrusted input (support tickets, scraped pages, third-party API output): the reader agents that touch it get NO privileged actions — no edits, no shell side effects — and separate agents act on their sanitized summaries. A prompt injection in the data then has nothing to grab.
• Workflow subagents run with acceptEdits and inherit the session's tool allowlist — they apply file edits without prompting, so the deny-list / bash-guard hook is the load-bearing safety boundary, not an interactive confirmation. Give each agent an explicit scope (which files/commands are in-bounds), keep untrusted-input readers tool-restricted per the quarantine rule above, and don't enable workflows in a project that lacks the bash-guard PreToolUse hook.
• Effort is model-conditional. On fable subagents, default effort is high (xhigh only for the most capability-sensitive stage); on opus keep xhigh for coding/synthesis. Route a stage to fable when it is long-horizon, ambiguous, vision-heavy, or stalled twice on opus — not for routine fan-out throughput.

When NOT to use

A task a regular session finishes in minutes does not need a workflow, and most traditional coding tasks do not need a panel of five reviewers. The overhead only pays off when scale, verification, or open-endedness demand structure.

Common token-wasting mistakes:

• No token budget — the single biggest cost multiplier.
• The same agent works AND verifies — reintroduces self-preferential bias.
• Treating parallel and pipeline as interchangeable — barriers where none is needed, or missing barriers before synthesis.
• Skipping /goal on loop patterns — soft completion ends the loop early.
• Absolute scoring where a tournament's pairwise comparison was needed.
• Letting untrusted content reach an agent that can act.
• Never saving working workflows — save them, ship them as a skill, and adapt the template per task instead of rebuilding from scratch.