Pipeline Orchestrator

Use this skill when an automation job is really a chain of steps - scrape, then run it through an AI model, then send an alert - and you want each step to retry on transient failure and the whole run to resume from the last good step. It is a generic, dependency-light runner: stages are ordinary functions, and state is checkpointed to a JSON file so a 429 in the AI step never forces a full re-scrape.

When to invoke

• User says: "chain these steps" / "scrape then summarize then notify" / "make the pipeline resumable" / "retry between stages"
• Code in the conversation uses: a script that does fetch -> transform -> deliver in sequence and fails partway through.

When NOT to invoke

• The work is a single call with no real stages.
• The user needs a distributed DAG engine (Airflow, Temporal) with workers and a scheduler, not a single-process chain.

Concrete example

User input:

My nightly job scrapes a board, asks Gemini to summarize, then pushes Telegram. If Gemini rate-limits, don't re-scrape.

Output:

# Copy assets/pipeline.py into your project, then:
from pipeline import run_pipeline

def scrape(_):     return fetch_board()          # your scraper
def summarize(rows): return gemini_summary(rows) # your AI step
def alert(text):   return send_telegram(text)    # see telegram-alerter

# checkpoints after each stage; a crash in summarize resumes there, not at scrape
result = run_pipeline([scrape, summarize, alert], state_path=".nightly_state.json")

Pattern to apply

1. Model the job as an ordered list of single-argument callables; each returns the next stage's input.
2. Wrap every stage in exponential-backoff retry so a transient error does not kill the run.
3. Checkpoint {done_index, value} to a JSON file after each successful stage.
4. On resume, skip completed stages and reuse their cached output.
5. Keep credentials out of the runner - each stage reads its own env (see [[telegram-alerter]], [[gemini-flash-budget]]).

Reference: assets/pipeline.py.

Source

Distilled from production use across the author's automation projects. v1.0.0. See also: [[cron-dispatch]], [[telegram-alerter]].

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