Chain-of-Agents Pattern

Chain-of-agents is a pipeline where each agent performs a stage of work and passes a structured artifact to the next.

Stages might include: extract → classify → validate → execute → report.

The “chain” is designed to reduce ambiguity and increase reproducibility through explicit interfaces between stages.

Pipelines are easier to test, audit, and improve than monolithic agents.

They align with enterprise process thinking: discrete steps, clear owners, measurable outcomes.

Failures are contained to a stage and can be retried or escalated without rerunning everything.

• Passing unstructured prose between stages, leading to compounding errors.
• No idempotency: re-running a stage causes duplicate actions.
• No validation gates between steps, allowing bad outputs to propagate.
• Over-chaining: too many tiny steps without clear value.

• Copyl’s workflow and integration approach maps naturally to staged pipelines with observable steps.
• Tool boundaries and audit logs provide stage-level accountability.
• Governance controls ensure each stage operates within its allowed scope.

• Planner-Executor Pattern
• Retry / Self-Healing Agent Pattern
• Tool-Using Agent Pattern
• Multi-Agent Collaboration Pattern
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