Design Your System
One workflow, end to end: trigger, data, knowledge, actions, feedback.
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Pick one end-to-end workflow
Pick ONE workflow from your work — the one that would save you the most time or prevent the most errors if it were automated end-to-end. Design it:
Cornwall Market: Monthly Client Reconciliation
Trigger: Routine — 1st of each month at 6 AM
Data: QuickBooks MCP — all transactions for the previous month
Knowledge: Categorization skill — vendor rules, account codes, exception flags
Actions:
1. Pull all transactions from the previous month
2. Apply categorization rules, flag uncategorized items
3. Calculate food cost percentage by department
4. Compare vendor pricing to previous months — flag increases over 5%
5. Identify late payments and calculate average days-to-pay by vendor
6. Generate reconciliation report
7. Send to accountant via email with flagged items highlighted
Feedback: Accountant reviews, makes corrections. Corrections feed back into the categorization skill via self-modify. Next month's reconciliation is more accurate.
Design your own compound system. Fill in these fields:
Trigger: What starts the workflow? (schedule, event, manual)
Data: What data source does it use? (which MCP server)
Knowledge: What rules does it apply? (which skill)
Actions: What does the system do, step by step?
Feedback: How do corrections flow back? Who reviews? How does the system improve?
This is the exercise that turns reading into action. One workflow, designed end-to-end, using the tools you have already built.
Check your understanding
Answer in your own words — write it down before opening the key. Your tutor grades against the criteria and generates fresh variants on retries.
Q1. Design one compound workflow end-to-end for your work: trigger, data source, knowledge applied, action steps, and — the part most people forget — the feedback path. Why does omitting feedback cap the system’s value?
Answer key — attempt every question first
Answer key
Q1
Model answer: Any complete design passes: real trigger, named data source, named knowledge/skill, concrete action steps, and a feedback path (who reviews, where corrections land). Without feedback the system plateaus at day-one quality — it repeats its mistakes forever, which is a scheduled script, not a compound system.
Pass criteria: all five components present; feedback explicitly routes corrections back into knowledge; plateau consequence stated