Composable agentic pipeline patterns for Spring AI — steps, typed context, branching, loops, quality gates.

Compose steps into workflows using a fluent Java DSL. Each step does one thing: call an LLM, run a function, invoke an external agent. Quality gates evaluate output at each stage. Every step transition is traced for behavioral analysis — so you can answer: which steps should be deterministic instead of LLM-driven? What knowledge is the agent missing? Does it need better real-time steering?

The workflow compiles to a graph intermediate representation that separates definition from execution, enabling portable runtimes without changing workflow code.

Documentation: lab.pollack.ai/projects/agent-workflow

<dependency>
    <groupId>io.github.markpollack</groupId>
    <artifactId>workflow-core</artifactId>
    <version>0.2.0</version>
</dependency>

Workflow.define("pr-review")
    .step(fetchDiff)
    .then(analyzeDiff)
    .gate(new JudgeGate(jury, 0.8))
        .onPass(postComment)
        .onFail(revise)
    .end()
    .run(event);

Steps are the building blocks. Each takes input, does work, produces output:

• Deterministic — a Java function (API call, parsing, formatting)
• Single LLM call — ChatClientStep wraps a Spring AI ChatClient
• Agentic session — ClaudeStep runs a full multi-turn agent loop (dozens of tool calls, minutes of execution) and returns a typed result. The workflow sees it as one step.

step · then · branch · repeatUntil · repeatUntilOutput · parallel · decision · gate · supervisor · onError · terminate

The workflow definition is pure data — nodes and edges, not opaque lambdas. This enables:

• Portable runtimes — LocalStepRunner (in-process, zero overhead), CheckpointingStepRunner (JDBC crash recovery), TemporalStepRunner (distributed durable execution). Same workflow code, swap a @Bean.
• Tracing — every step transition recorded for observability and behavioral analysis
• Quality gates — JudgeGate evaluates output mid-pipeline, routes to retry with verdict feedback
• Inspection — the compiled graph is serializable, walkable, visualizable

Requires Java 21.

./mvnw clean compile
./mvnw test

Business Source License 1.1 — see LICENSE for details.