Hand-offs
A hand-off is how one specialist in your team passes work to the next: it finishes its duty cleanly, and that clean finish is what starts the next specialist's duty.
Shared workspace files
Specialists on the same team read and write to a shared workspace. One specialist drops a file — a list, a draft, a summary — and the next specialist in the chain picks it up from there. This is how a research step feeds a writing step, or a triage step feeds a reply-drafting step, without you copying anything between them by hand.
One duty triggering the next
When you deploy a team, Cloudia wires each specialist's duty to hand off to the next one after a clean run. The receiving specialist's duty starts automatically — you don't need to run it yourself, and it won't start early on partial or failed output from the step before it. Visual workflow builders like Make excel at linear scenarios; specialist hand-offs here are closer to an employee pipeline on a persistent desktop — see CloudAxis versus Make automation if you are deciding between scenario credits and an agent OS.
Other ways a duty can start
Besides a hand-off from another specialist, a duty can be started by:
- A schedule — the duty's own Runs when setting.
- A webhook — an external tool calls in and starts the duty.
- An email trigger — an incoming message matching your rules starts the duty.
- Manual Run now — you start it yourself from the dashboard.
Any of these can sit at the front of a chain — the hand-offs further downstream work the same way regardless of what started the first step.
Design tip: one clear outcome per run
Give each duty in the chain one clear outcome to produce before it hands off — a finished draft, a triaged list, a sent report. A duty that hands off before its job is really done pushes half-finished work downstream, leaving the next specialist with nothing solid to act on.
Avoid circular hand-offs
A hand-off chain should move in one direction. Don't wire a later specialist's duty to hand back to an earlier one in the same chain — that creates a loop that can keep running instead of finishing. If a step genuinely needs to revisit earlier work, set it up as a fresh chain rather than looping back into the same one.
When a hand-off doesn't happen
If a duty fails or ends without a clean finish, the hand-off simply doesn't fire — the chain stops at that step and you're notified, rather than the next specialist starting on incomplete input.