Flows

A skill does one thing well. A flow gets an outcome: take a brand from no Pinterest presence to posting weekly; produce an advertising campaign from brief to launch; run the morning brief. A flow is a written procedure — steps, inputs, outputs, which skills each step calls, where a human decides — that an agent executes. Agents execute flows; flows call skills.

Why flows exist

Left to itself, a capable agent will reach an outcome a different way every time. That is fine for a one-off and corrosive for a business: you cannot improve a process you cannot repeat, and you cannot trust a process whose guardrails depend on the agent remembering them. A flow makes the path explicit, so it can be repeated, rated, and improved — and so the guardrails are structural rather than remembered.

A flow is also the plan. When you ask for something that matches a flow, the flow is the plan: its steps name the deliverables, the skills, and the decision points. Work that matches no flow gets a plan written first, deliverables declared up front, before anything is built.

What every flow must have

Every flow in the catalogue meets three requirements. They came from an audit that found only one home-grown flow carried all three; now they are the standard new flows are written to and old ones are brought up to.

1. Announce as you go. At the start of each step the agent tells you which skill or flow it is running — “Running hook-extract now.” Never silently. This is what makes the nested progress trail in a conversation possible.
2. A hard-gates block that overrides everything. Near the top of the flow, a labelled section of rules that beat any other instruction and any “auto” mode. Every flow has at least the cost gate; flows that generate media add gates for reference images, quality tier, and logo use.
3. A cost gate on every paid step. Quote the model, size, quantity, and expected cost. Ask. Stop and wait for an explicit fire word — “go”, “run it”, “ship”. A general instruction like “do all of them” is not a fire word; the agent re-quotes at the new scope and waits again. Approval for one run never covers the next.

A cost mentioned in prose is not a gate

The gate is the stop-and-wait structure, restated inside the paid skill itself so that calling the skill on its own is also safe. Mentioning a price and carrying on is exactly what the rule exists to prevent.

Setup once, across the arc

A flow’s setup section declares the context needed across the whole outcome — this brand’s customer language, its visual rules, a strategy document. The skills the flow calls inherit that context rather than reloading it. Each piece of context loads exactly once per task; a standalone skill call declares its own.

Human decisions are named, not discovered

A flow marks the points where a person must decide — approve the cover, confirm the price, publish — before work starts, so they arrive as scheduled questions rather than interruptions. Between those points the agent proceeds. At them, it stops and asks with concrete options (how the agent asks).

Where flows run

• From chat — you ask; the agent picks the flow that fits and says so.
• From a schedule — a registered automation names the flow (Schedules & triggers).
• From a signal — a channel engine proposes work that a flow then carries out.

Every run records what it started, which skills it ran, what it produced, and what it cost, so the outcome can be traced and the flow rated.

Flows change carefully

Flows are shared infrastructure for every brand, so they are not created or overwritten casually: a new flow or a change to one is proposed and confirmed with the owner. Improvements follow the same evidence-first contract as skills.

live The flow catalogue, the three-requirement authoring standard, and its audit tooling are live. The gold-standard reference flow is a full cinematic-ad production pipeline; every new flow mirrors its shape.

Related

SkillsThe atomic methods a flow sequences.

Schedules & triggersRunning a flow unattended.

Example: create and launch a productA launch flow followed end to end.

Extending WilsonOSSkills, flows, brand context, and connections as the layers that change per business.