Core Concepts
OpenFlows runs a disciplined engineering team of AI agents that coordinate through a shared, governed system. The concepts in this section are the vocabulary the rest of the documentation uses: who the team is, how a ticket travels from issue to merged pull request, why the team plans before it codes, where the coordination state lives, where work actually runs, and how security holds together.
If you are deciding whether OpenFlows fits your organisation, read these pages first. If you are already running it, they explain the reasoning behind the behaviour you see in production.
One idea anchors everything
Concepts at a Glance
| Concept | What problem it solves | Read more |
|---|---|---|
| The Team | Five specialised agents with narrow roles and enforced hand-offs, so no single agent both writes and reviews its own work. | Details → |
| The Ticket Lifecycle | A fixed path from GitHub issue to merged pull request, with recovery and human escalation as part of the loop. | Details → |
| The Planning Gate | No code before an approved plan; the gate is structural and single-use approvals can’t be replayed. | Details → |
| The Coordination Store | A shared, durable record of truth that only the orchestrator and the worker command surface may write. | Details → |
| Workspaces | Thin, disposable, isolated execution seats with no secrets and real, attributable identity. | Details → |
| Tenants | Strictly separated teams on one server, isolated by both identity and namespaced coordination state. | Details → |
| Human Escalation | The system stops and hands you the decisions that need a judgment call, rather than guessing. | Details → |
| The Agent Registry | Team configuration without code or restarts, with a guardrail against accidentally zeroing a role. | Details → |
| The Coder / OpenFlows Split | Coder governs where agents run; OpenFlows governs how they coordinate. The founding asymmetry. | Details → |
How the Concepts Fit Together
OpenFlows is an orchestration layer that turns a self-hosted runtime into an autonomous engineering team. The Coder / OpenFlows split sets the stage: the runtime provides governed, ephemeral workspaces and real identity, while OpenFlows supplies the coordination that makes them a team. The agent team plans, builds, reviews, merges, and documents, and each ticket moves through a fixed lifecycle. The planning gate keeps every ticket honest by refusing to advance work without an approved plan. All of this is held together by the coordination store - the single source of truth - and configured through the agent registry. Tenants isolate many teams on one server, and human escalation keeps a person in the loop exactly where a judgment call is needed.
Where to Start
Read the split first, then the gate