Agent SwarmAgent Swarm
PlaybooksHot patterns

Hot Patterns

Five patterns that recur across every playbook — litmus tests, drain loops, HITL gates, per-customer working directories, and no-op workflows. These are the recipes that compound, regardless of which use case you're building.

These are the patterns that show up in nearly every playbook. Treat them as recipes — short, focused, opinionated — that you can pull into any new flow you build on top of the swarm.

  • Litmus Tests — LLM-as-judge quality gates that hard-reject sub-bar output, using a different model family from the generator.
  • Drain Loops — turn one big ticket into a chain of stacked, individually-reviewable PRs, then a merge loop that halts on the first failure.
  • HITL Gates — pause a workflow mid-flight until a human approves in Slack. The agent does the work; the human owns the irreversible step.
  • Per-Customer Working Directories — give each top account a persistent folder in agent-fs so context compounds across months.
  • No-op When Nothing Changed — detect "did anything actually happen?" and skip silently when not. Default for any scheduled job.