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adr-sequential-pipeline-flow-runner

Decision

Promote the Sequential Pipeline Flow Runner pattern to a core institutionalised global architectural standard, governing deterministic step execution and shared context propagation across continuous architecture steering flows.

Context

  • Source: governance-flow
  • Pattern: sequential-pipeline-flow-runner
  • Promotion Recommendation: recommendation-sequential-pipeline-flow-runner
  • Scope Classification: global
  • Scope Classification Artifact: pattern-scope-classification

As autonomous agent workflows expand, unstructured multi-agent loops introduce non-deterministic execution, infinite loops, and debugging opacity. FlowRunner establishes a deterministic pipeline execution spine with shared context accumulation, termination on critical governance failure, and strict linear sequencing.

Scope

Applicability: Universal application across all continuous architecture steering workflows, command-line entrypoints, and multi-stage verification pipelines within ideas-to-life-cas and dependent systems.

Applicable globally across batch and CI/CD agent-driven architectural assessment and generation pipelines.

Consequences

Governance

Institutionalises deterministic stage progression and explicit gate checks, blocking unauthorized artifact mutation and guaranteeing auditable execution trails.

Execution

Standardises multi-phase step execution through FlowRunner, enabling early exit on validation failures and passing immutable contexts between pipeline components.

System Behaviour

Eliminates non-deterministic agent loop deviations and bounds token and compute expenditure by enforcing strictly ordered step chains.

Evidence Summary

Promotion Evidence

Implemented as the core FlowRunner orchestrator in src/cas_runner/runner.py, with declared step registries in src/cas_runner/steps/registry.py and entrypoint boundaries verified in CLI commands.

Promotion Criteria

Satisfied criteria include significance, reusability, recurrence, evidence quality, governance maturity, and strategic alignment.

Governance Risks

Pipeline latency accumulation across long sequential step chains, mitigated by selective short-circuiting and future DAG parallelism explorations.

Traceability

Pattern Proposal

sequential-pipeline-flow-runner

Scope Classification

Artifact: pattern-scope-classification

Classification: global

Promotion Recommendation

recommendation-sequential-pipeline-flow-runner

Promotion Decision

promotion-decision-sequential-pipeline-flow-runner

Next Step

  • Submit ADR to Architecture Forum for formal institutionalisation
  • Generate global pattern record in knowledge/global/patterns/