Autonomous Pipeline Architecture¶

The agentd autonomous pipeline is a label-driven system where GitHub labels trigger specialized agents at each stage of an issue's lifecycle. A central conductor agent runs on a 5-minute cron to drive state transitions, manage the merge queue, and escalate anything it cannot resolve automatically.

End-to-End Architecture¶

flowchart TB
    subgraph GH["GitHub (source of truth)"]
        direction TB
        Issue["Issue\n(filed by human)"]
        PR["Pull Request\n(opened by worker)"]
    end

    subgraph ORCH["agentd Orchestrator"]
        direction TB
        WF1["triage-worker\n(needs-triage label)"]
        WF2["enrichment-worker\n(enrich-agent label)"]
        WF3["issue-worker\n(agent label)"]
        WF4["plan-worker\n(plan-agent label)"]
        WF5["pull-request-reviewer\n(review-agent label)"]
        WF6["merge-worker\n(merge-ready label)"]
        WF7["conductor-sync\n(cron every 5 min)"]
        WF8["triage-enrich-chain\n(dispatch_result)"]
        WF9["review-merge-chain\n(dispatch_result)"]
    end

    subgraph AGENTS["Agents (tmux sessions)"]
        direction TB
        COND["conductor"]
        TRIAGE["triage"]
        ENRICH["enricher"]
        WORKER["worker"]
        PLAN["planner"]
        REVIEW["reviewer"]
        OTHER["research / security /\ntester / refactor /\ndocs / designer"]
    end

    subgraph ROOMS["Communication Rooms"]
        ENG["#engineering"]
        OPS["#operations"]
        SEC["#security"]
    end

    Issue -->|label applied| WF1
    Issue -->|label applied| WF2
    Issue -->|label applied| WF3
    Issue -->|label applied| WF4
    PR   -->|label applied| WF5
    PR   -->|label applied| WF6

    WF1 -->|dispatch| TRIAGE
    WF2 -->|dispatch| ENRICH
    WF3 -->|dispatch| WORKER
    WF4 -->|dispatch| PLAN
    WF5 -->|dispatch| REVIEW
    WF6 -->|dispatch| COND
    WF7 -->|dispatch| COND
    WF8 -->|dispatch| COND
    WF9 -->|dispatch| COND

    TRIAGE  -->|removes needs-triage\napplies triaged| GH
    ENRICH  -->|posts comment\nno label change| GH
    WORKER  -->|opens PR\napplies review-agent| GH
    REVIEW  -->|approves or\nrequests changes| GH
    COND    -->|squash-merge\nrestack| GH

    COND   --> OPS
    TRIAGE --> ENG
    WORKER --> ENG
    REVIEW --> ENG
    OTHER  --> ENG

Pipeline Stages¶

An issue moves through these stages in order. Stages marked optional are skipped for well-understood issues.

The conductor's 5-minute cron drives transitions that agents don't trigger directly: applying needs-triage to unlabeled issues, promoting triaged issues to agent, promoting approved PRs to merge-ready, and re-dispatching needs-rework PRs.

Agent Roster¶

Workflow Chaining¶

Two workflows use the dispatch_result trigger to automatically advance the pipeline when an upstream dispatch completes:

triage-enrich-chain - When triage-worker completes successfully, the conductor applies enrich-agent to the issue, causing enrichment-worker to pick it up next.

review-merge-chain - When pull-request-reviewer completes successfully, the conductor checks whether the PR meets merge criteria and applies merge-ready if it does.

Both chain workflows ship with enabled: false and require source_workflow_id to be set before enabling. See Workflow Chaining for setup instructions.

Label Summary¶

Full label reference: State Machine

Related¶

• State Machine - Full label reference and lifecycle diagram
• Conductor Behavior - Sync protocol, merge queue, escalation
• Troubleshooting - Common failure modes
• Human Approval Gates - What requires human input
• Agent Onboarding - How to create new agents and workflows