A waterfall workflow is built by writing each step to explicitly use the output of the previous step as its input — chaining them so information flows downhill from trigger to final output without any manual hand-offs.
Why It’s Called a Waterfall
The waterfall metaphor comes from how water flows downhill: it doesn’t skip levels, it doesn’t flow upward, and each level receives everything from the one above it. A waterfall workflow works the same way. The raw input arrives at Step 1. Step 1 processes it and passes the result down to Step 2. Step 2 processes that result and passes it to Step 3. And so on, until the final output emerges at the bottom — fully processed, formatted, and ready to use.
This is different from a parallel workflow, where multiple steps run simultaneously on the same input. In a waterfall, each step depends on the previous one. The transcript has to be extracted before it can be summarized; the summary has to exist before the article can be written. The dependency chain flows in one direction — down.
How to Write Waterfall Steps in a Skill File
The key to making a waterfall work is explicit handoff language in each step’s instructions. Each step should end with: “Pass [specific output] to the next step.” And each step should begin with: “Using [specific output from previous step]…” This explicit language tells the agent that the output of Step N is the input of Step N+1 — and prevents the agent from using the original trigger input when it should be using processed intermediate data.
For example: Step 1 — “Fetch the YouTube transcript for the provided URL. Pass the full transcript text to Step 2.” Step 2 — “Using the transcript from Step 1, extract the five main teaching concepts as bullet points. Pass the bullet list to Step 3.” Step 3 — “Using the teaching concepts from Step 2, write a 500-word FAQ article. Pass the completed article to Step 4.” Step 4 — “Using the article from Step 3, publish it to WordPress as a docs post.”
Each step’s language reinforces the chain. When you read the skill file top to bottom, you can trace exactly where each piece of information comes from and where it goes next. If any step breaks that chain — by using the wrong input or producing the wrong output format — the waterfall breaks at that point and later steps receive bad data.
What This Means for Educators
The waterfall model is the most reliable workflow structure for content production tasks because it’s completely linear. There are no branches, no conditions, no parallel threads — just a clear top-to-bottom flow that’s easy to trace, debug, and improve. Start with waterfall workflows for all your content pipelines and add complexity only when you have a specific reason to.
The Simple Rule
Write every step with two sentences: what it does, and what it passes to the next step. That structure ensures the waterfall flows cleanly and makes it immediately obvious when a step is missing its handoff or receiving the wrong input.