Workflows

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Why workflows?

• Structure business processes into testable, reusable steps.
• Enrich AI scenarios with strict validation, shared metadata, and cancellation through AbortSignal.
• Monitor execution with run.watch() or run.stream() to build live dashboards.
• Introduce human collaboration or controlled parallelism with minimal effort.

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Must-read guides

• Introduction – create your first steps and run a full workflow.
• Conditional branches – route execution according to business rules.
• While loops – repeat a step until a predicate is satisfied.
• Parallel & foreach – process collections and run tasks concurrently.
• Human steps – put a human in the loop and manage the request → resume cycle.
• Telemetry – instrument runs with OpenTelemetry and Langfuse.

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Core concepts

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Typed steps

import { createStep } from "@ai_kit/core";
import { z } from "zod";

export const fetchWeather = createStep({
  id: "fetch-weather",
  description: "Fetch current weather",
  inputSchema: z.object({ city: z.string().min(1) }),
  handler: async ({ input, signal }) => {
    if (signal.aborted) throw new Error("Request aborted");
    return { forecast: `Sunny in ${input.city}` };
  },
});

import { cloneStep } from "@ai_kit/core";

export const fetchWeatherCopy = cloneStep(fetchWeather, {
  id: "fetch-weather-copy",
  description: "Weather for another city",
});

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Context & events

const notifyTeam = createStep({
  id: "notify-team",
  handler: async ({ context }) => {
    context.emit({ type: "notification", data: { channel: "slack" } });
    return { status: "sent" };
  },
});

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Instrumentation

• workflow.createRun() instantiates a reusable run.
• run.watch(listener) listens to events (workflow:start, step:success, step:event, …).
• run.stream() returns an async iterator to consume events live.
• run.cancel() aborts execution through the underlying AbortSignal.

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Best practices

• Declare explicit schemas to catch inconsistencies early.
• Compose short, testable steps with clear descriptions.
• Emit business events to feed your monitoring and audit trails.
• Combine workflows with agents to model richer decision-making loops.