Pipeline
Ordered stages that pass work forward — research, then implement, then review — with quality gates that reject bad handoffs early.
Most real coding sessions are already a pipeline: research, then implement, then review. Each agent's output becomes the next agent's input. Pipeline makes that shape explicit instead of leaving you to shuttle text between terminals.
Build one in the Builder with Cmd+2 / Ctrl+2, or start one straight from the composer.
Stages
A pipeline is an ordered list of stages. Each stage has an agent, a model, and a brief, and receives the previous stage's output as its input.
Because the order is declared rather than improvised, you can see at a glance which agent is doing what — and so can the agents.
Quality gates
A stage can accept or reject the handoff it receives.
This is the point of the feature. Without a gate, a polished review of a broken first draft is a real and expensive outcome; with one, the reject happens at stage two instead of stage four.
Rejects are capped — two rounds by default. After that the pipeline escalates to you rather than looping forever between two agents who disagree.
Starting one from the composer
Write it as a sentence:
research the auth bug, then grok drafts a fix, then opencode reviews it
That is recognized as a pipeline, with your current terminal as stage 1. The word then is the signal — Agent Input in Auto mode will tell you it chose Pipeline and why.
Watching it run
Mission Control shows a stage strip for a running pipeline, so debugging a four-stage review looks like a four-stage review rather than an org chart.
Interrupted runs — intentional stops included — stay listed in Run & Logs with the error reason visible in the run detail, and can be exported as a zip with the orchestration log attached.
Pipeline or hierarchy?
- Pipeline when the work has an order: this, then that, then the other.
- Hierarchy when the work has a chain of command: a lead who parcels work out and collects it back.
- Team or Swarm when the work is parallel and the agents are peers.
The Pattern Guide — the ? beside the mode control in Agent Input — puts all five side by side with the one verb that separates each from the others.