A small tweak that made my automations way more stable
Spent this week cleaning up a few messy flows and hit something interesting.
Most of the failures weren’t from the tools. They were from mixing reasoning and execution inside the same step.
Once I separated them, everything got smoother.
The agent handled decisions.
The workflow handled actions.
Latency dropped and errors almost disappeared.
Curious if others here split their logic this way or if you keep everything in one loop. What’s worked best for you?
Trending on Indie Hackers
Totally agree—mixing decision-making and execution in the same step almost always creates hidden friction. Splitting them forces clarity: the agent thinks, the workflow does. I’ve seen the same thing on my end—once the reasoning is isolated, everything becomes more predictable and way easier to debug. Curious to see how others structure this too.
Yeah, exactly. When both are mixed, half the failures come from the agent second-guessing itself while executing.
Once I split them, the agent commits to a decision and the workflow just runs it. Debugging became almost boring, which is a good sign.
Still experimenting with how much context to pass between layers. How do you structure that handoff on your side?
This is a great insight. Most failures I’ve seen in agent workflows also come from blending reasoning + execution in the same block. When you separate them, the agent becomes predictable and the workflow becomes resilient. Curious did you also notice fewer hallucinations once the reasoning step was isolated? Would love to hear how you structure the handoff.”
Right, that was the biggest shift I saw too.
When reasoning was isolated, the agent stopped drifting mid-execution. Hallucinations dropped a lot because the workflow wasn’t forcing the model to “think” and “do” in the same breath.
For the handoff, I keep it minimal:
the agent outputs a clean intent block, and the workflow handles the full execution path.
Curious how granular you go with your reasoning step.
Spot on. Clear boundaries between reasoning and execution improve reliability fast.
Exactly. Once I separated them, the failures almost stopped. Have you tried multi layer setups before, or mostly single loop flows?
Nice insight. Most automation failures I’ve seen come from unclear ownership between logic and action. Your approach seems cleaner. Where did you notice the biggest improvement?
The biggest gain was in long running flows. The moment I split decision making out, retries behaved properly and the steps stopped drifting. Have you seen similar issues in your automations?
Yeah, this tracks. Any time I’ve separated decision logic from action steps, debugging becomes way easier. Did you hit any downsides or extra complexity after splitting them?
A bit of extra structure, yes, but it paid off fast. The flow became easier to debug and reason about. What kind of tasks have you seen break when logic and actions mix?
Good observation. We’ve dealt with similar issues in multi step flows. Keeping reasoning isolated usually reduces error chains. Did you test this across different workflows, or just one type?
Tested across a few. The pattern held up especially well in multi step tasks. Curious what type of workflows you usually build backend, marketing, or something else?
Interesting point. We see the same thing in campaign automations. When logic and execution blend, the whole flow gets unpredictable. Curious how much this improved your consistency.
A noticeable jump. Failures dropped and the flow stopped looping in the wrong places. Do you separate logic and execution in your campaigns too?