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Workflow Enhancement

After a workflow is generated, the enhancement system reviews it for reliability, security, and performance. It identifies potential issues and proposes concrete improvements that you can approve and apply, or dismiss if you prefer the workflow as-is.

Enhancement is designed to take a workflow from "it works in a demo" to "we can trust this in production", without changing what the workflow does.

[Screenshot needed: Enhancement panel showing a list of proposed changes with approve/reject buttons for each]

The Review Process

Enhancement uses three specialist critics to examine your workflow from different angles:

Reliability Critic

Checks for issues that could cause a workflow to fail during execution:

  • Missing error handling on steps that call external services
  • Steps that lack retry logic for transient failures
  • Dependencies between steps that could break if an upstream step returns unexpected data
  • Timeout and circuit-breaker gaps for long-running operations

Security Critic

Checks for issues that could expose sensitive data or create unintended side effects:

  • Parameters that might contain or leak credentials
  • Steps that write to external systems without adequate validation
  • Input data that is not sanitised before use

Performance Critic

Checks for issues that could make a workflow slower or more expensive than necessary:

  • Steps that could be batched together instead of running sequentially
  • Redundant API calls that fetch the same data multiple times
  • Operations that would benefit from rate limiting to avoid hitting external service quotas

Each critic produces a prioritised list of findings, ranked by severity (critical, warning, or informational).

Automatic Hardening: The Iron Layer

Beyond the critic reviews, the enhancement system includes an "iron layer" of automatic hardening modules. These apply targeted, low-risk improvements to specific aspects of a workflow:

Module What It Does
Error handling Adds structured error handling to steps that lack it
Retry logic Adds retry behaviour with backoff for steps that call external services
Input validation Adds checks for required parameters and data types before a step executes
Rate limiting Adds rate-limit awareness to prevent hitting external API quotas
Circuit breakers Adds circuit-breaker patterns so that repeated failures cause a step to stop retrying gracefully
Security sanitisation Adds input sanitisation to prevent credential leakage or injection
Idempotency Adds safeguards so that retrying a step does not cause duplicate side effects
Batch optimisation Combines multiple similar operations into batch calls where the target service supports it
Configuration management Externalises hardcoded values into configurable parameters
Data fallback Adds fallback behaviour so that steps degrade gracefully when upstream data is missing

Low-risk improvements from the iron layer are applied automatically. Higher-risk changes are queued for your review.

How to Use Enhancement

  1. Generate or open a workflow in the workflow editor.
  2. Start Enhancement from the editor toolbar.
  3. Review the proposals. Each proposed change shows what will be modified and why.
  4. Approve or reject individual changes. You can apply some and skip others.
  5. Re-run Virtual Run after applying changes to confirm the workflow still behaves as expected.

Enhancement is iterative. After you apply a round of changes and re-run Virtual Run, you can run enhancement again to catch anything new. The cycle is: review, approve, apply, verify.

[Screenshot needed: Enhancement flow showing the review-approve-apply-verify cycle in the workflow editor]

What Enhancement Does Not Do

Enhancement improves how a workflow executes, not what it does. It will not:

  • Change the purpose or business logic of your workflow
  • Add or remove steps that alter the workflow's intent
  • Modify which services or integrations the workflow uses

If a critic identifies an issue it cannot address (for example, a business logic concern), it logs the finding so you can review it manually.

Pairing Enhancement with Other Safety Tools

Enhancement works well alongside the platform's other safety mechanisms:

  • Virtual Run lets you verify the enhanced workflow before it runs live. See Virtual Run Preview.
  • Governance and safety provides runtime guardrails that complement the build-time improvements from enhancement. See Governance and Safety.
  • Settings let you configure approval thresholds and safety modes that interact with enhancement recommendations. See Settings.