Pipeline Triad Pattern
Staff each pipeline stage with a triad — Creator generates an artifact, Critic finds flaws, Arbiter makes a binding PASS/FAIL/PARTIAL decision — with four explicit human gates between stages.
Problem
Single-agent-per-stage pipelines lose the maker-checker-approver structure that gave human pipelines their robustness. Without explicit Creator/Critic/Arbiter triads, agents drift, errors propagate, and there's no binding decision point. Russian Habr 2026 source documents this as the pattern from banking compliance applied to agent pipelines.
Solution
Per stage: Creator agent produces the artifact (spec, code, test, doc). Critic agent finds flaws with detailed reasoning. Arbiter agent makes PASS/FAIL/PARTIAL decision with citation to both Creator's output and Critic's flaws. Between stages: four human gates structurally enforce review at requirement, readiness, deployment, production-confirmation transitions. Mirrors banking maker-checker-approver compliance. Pair with supervisor-plus-gate, policy-gated-agent-action, human-in-the-loop.
When to use
- Pipelines where the maker-checker-approver structure was load-bearing in the human equivalent.
- Stage-level decisions have material consequences.
- Cost and latency budgets allow triads + human gates.
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