Workflows

Workflows are multi-step automations that run inside Housecat. A workflow is checkpointed at every step: it can retry on failure, sleep, wait for an approval, and pick up exactly where it left off if the system restarts mid-run. They’re how Housecat runs business logic that has to be reliable, not just best-effort.

Build a workflow to sync forwarded emails with our Notion CRM.

User

Building a workflow with these steps: save attachments, analyze email and attachments, update CRM, send email summary.

Housecat

How Workflows Run

Every workflow moves through a series of steps, and the result of each step is saved. If a later step fails — a flaky API, a timeout, a deploy — the workflow resumes from the last good checkpoint instead of starting over or doing the work twice. Steps can also suspend the run entirely: a workflow can sleep until a wall-clock time, or wait for an external event like a Slack approval before continuing.

Triggers

A workflow starts from a trigger declared in its config:

  • Email — an inbound email to a configured address kicks off the run, passing the sender, subject, body, and any attachments.
  • Slack — a Slack message shortcut (for example “Save to CRM”) dispatches the workflow with the source message.
  • Schedule — run on a cron schedule like any other job.

Settings

Workflows expose operator-tunable settings — prompt text, model choice, Notion database IDs and field mappings, feature flags — that you can change without touching code. Settings are saved per user, so your configuration sticks across runs. A dry-run mode runs every analysis and diff step end to end but suppresses external writes, so you can preview exactly what a workflow would do before it touches your CRM or sends a reply.

Authoring Custom Workflows

The AI coding agent can build workflows by forking existing examples and modifying. A workflows playground lets you test workflows with example data before going live.