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.
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.