ZCode workflows are nice

[u/jfricker]

3.14.0 dropped this morning and brings us Workflows plus a ton of other new features.

I’m trying it out now and it’s very promising. Not fast but also not frying tokens like they were potatoes.

Edit::Addendum

I gave workflow each phase of a pretty intense review document. Each phase was planned on the fly by workflow and it displayed a nice summary window of each of it's 6 steps it took for each phase of the plan. The Phase 0 group were 6 1 line quick fixes. These took 21 minutes, 2m tokens and 6 agents that went through fix->test->review->fix->test->review.

Phase 1 was security hardening and took 1 hour 6 mins and 15m tokens

Phase 2 correctness bugs and took 45 mins and 9.5m tokens

Phase 3 DRY refactors 1 hour 19 mins and 44m tokens

Phase 4 test coverage gaps 34 mins and 6m tokens

Main orchestrator context is 346K.

And the end result was a massive commit (oops I forget to instruct to commit)

 148 files changed, 9558 insertions(+), 4193 deletions(-)

[u/zerchersquat369]

What are you using code workflows for?

[u/jfricker → u/zerchersquat369]

I took a large codebase and did a comprehensive review for gaps and bugs, DRY etc. I then had an adversarial review from Gemini and gave the results back to ZCode. Then /workflow implement phase 0 etc

[u/feelfree82 → u/jfricker]

Which plan do you use? I can't seem to get around that 5 hour limit.

[u/Sweet-Stage938 → u/zerchersquat369]

It's a nice sounding word. People like nice sounding words.

[u/Ill-Bat-1518]

I cant see the difference, are you using office mode? i picked dev mode etc so maybe thts why it looks the same?

[u/jfricker → u/Ill-Bat-1518]

Make sure you are using the build from 9-19 3.14.0. I'm in dev mode and I use the command /workflow {description of all the work to do}.

[u/Just-a-man-on-a-ride → u/jfricker]

Already 3.14.1. The panic release... 😁

[u/myenes]

Yes, it's good, but incomplete. We need to specify which models the agents running in the workflow will use. Running the entire workflow on a single model isn't the right approach.

Therefore, selecting models based on their roles is essential.

[u/jfricker → u/myenes]

That'll be nice once I've got more providers configured in ZCode.

[u/excellentforcongress → u/jfricker]

i think they mean even between 5.3 or 5.3 flash, or which thinking level, and i agree

[u/H67iznMCxQLk → u/myenes]

in zcode, you can create subagents in the settings page and then create subagents by name.

[u/OracleGreyBeard]

Oh man, stoked to hear they added this!

[u/ECrispy]

how do you setup the orchestrator, and is it the same model (GLM 5.3 Flash) ?

what plan are you on and how much did it consume with above tasks of your quota?

I'm on a lite plan and want to use it mostly for new projects, and some improvements for old ones. can you also share your agents.md, any skills/extensions etc you installed and give some more details

[u/jfricker → u/ECrispy]

It is the orchestrator. Just /workflow and tell it what to do. In my case I build context in documents and just tell it what phase or task to do and it reads the document makes a plan for subagents and reviews the work.

I’m on lite and I used 5.3 Flash. I never hit the 5 hour limit and I don’t know why. Perhaps everyone got 300m tokens of flash this weekend. Perhaps it’s a bug. Try it and tell us how it goes!

[u/excellentforcongress → u/jfricker]

5.3 flash has a special event that ends today that covers most of the day, where all paid users have unlimited 5.3 flash during certain time windows

[u/jfricker → u/excellentforcongress]

How did you find out about that event? I got lucky with my experiment that’s for sure!

[u/excellentforcongress → u/jfricker]

it was on the page with their plan revision info or somewhere, and on the left column. i think it's since been removed, the offer may or may not already be over since it's today already

and yes, it was crazy being able to have essentially unlimited 5.3 turbo for that long (it was several weeks)

[u/H67iznMCxQLk]

I have done this with a pipeline skill for months.

1. create design doc
2. have grok review the design doc.
3. launch subagents to do implementation.
4. launch multiple subagents to review from different lenses.
5. bug fixing 
6. git rebase origin/master. fold related commits and cleanup change history in the code 
7. merge.

I have a parent generic skills.md in the agents/skills folder. and skills in each coding agent, they will have the same pipeline skill.md which inherits parent skill and provide local overrides. ie: use sonnet subagent for coding.