Sequential Pattern: Agents in a Pipeline
~10 min read
Each agent adds value step by step — one generates, the next reviews, a third deploys — the straightforward pipeline pattern used in workflow automation, ETL chains, and multi-step reasoning.
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Key points
- •Each agent adds value step by step, in fixed order — one agent's output feeds directly into the next
- •The book's example: generate code -> review it -> deploy it, each stage building on the previous one
- •Used in workflow automation, ETL chains, and multi-step reasoning pipelines with genuine stage dependencies
- •Easy to reason about and debug, since there's a single linear path from input to output
- •Main limitation: total latency is the SUM of every stage's latency — no parallelism, even where some stages could theoretically run independently