Workflows are my favorite part of Octomind. Multi-step, self-verifying jobs defined in TOML, shipped through taps — the built-in muvon/tap carries eighteen of them: review, develop, debug, deep-review, plan-and-build, research, content, and more.
But there's one thing I kept doing that irritated me. To run a workflow mid-session, I left the session. Opened a terminal, piped input through stdin, watched JSONL scroll past. The workflow was doing its job, and I was watching it do its job from outside. I had a shell alias for it — something like octomind workflow review --format jsonl < notes.md — because typing that every time was worse than the context switch.
0.52.0 moves workflows inside the session.
Three shapes
/workflow → list installed tap workflows
/workflow review → show the definition, run nothing
/workflow review add rate limiting to the API → run it; the rest of the line is input
Everything after the workflow name is taken verbatim. No quoting rules, no argument parsing. If you've fought a CLI that eats your input at the first space, you know why this matters.
Under the hood it's the same runner as the command line (octomind workflow <name> --format jsonl, input on stdin), so nothing runs differently because it's in a session. The command blocks until the workflow finishes, then prints the final step's output and what the run cost.
The reason this matters isn't the typing. Leaving the session meant leaving the context — the thing I'd been talking about with the agent, the state of the repo, the reason I wanted the review at all. In the terminal I'm just a person watching JSONL again.
The agent can run them too
{"action": "workflow", "name": "plan-and-build", "input": "Add a --json flag to the export command"}
Detached, in the background. Results land in the session inbox on a later turn, and you can stop the run with tap(action="stop", session=<id>). In practice that means I can start a plan-and-build and keep working while it runs.
The tool description says it explicitly: only run a workflow when the user asked for one by name — never pick one on its own. Eighteen workflows is eighteen ways for an agent to decide on its own that something heavy is what I meant. It shouldn't, and now it can't.
The detail I like most: inspect before you run
Call a workflow with a name and no input, and you get the definition back: the steps, and where {{input}} lands.
/workflow deep-review
That's how I found out what deep-review actually does: it sweeps a change across five parallel lenses — correctness, security, concurrency, performance, design — then adversarially verifies every finding. A workflow that takes minutes and bills for them should be readable before you commit to it. Now reading the plan is the same command minus the input.
One honest limitation
Only tap workflows resolve by name in sessions. Local TOML paths stay CLI-only. If you have a workflow on disk that isn't in a tap, the alias still works.
What else shipped
The rest of the release is smaller, but most of it is things I hit myself:
- Spending-stop status surfaced. Tracked across sessions and ACP requests, reported via ACP/websocket, with a dedicated CLI status. Request spending resets at each request boundary.
- Pending background jobs are reconciled and report back once; detached job evidence survives.
- MCP resource updates find their session via registry fallback.
- Tool descriptions are no longer billed twice — fewer tokens per request.
- Compression failures explain themselves, supervisor constraint recitation is cleaner, and markdown headings are treated as structure, not as constraints.
Install
curl -fsSL https://octomind.run/install.sh | bash -s -- --version 0.52.0
Octomind is Apache-2.0 at github.com/Muvon/octomind. Full release notes: octomind.run/blog/octomind-0-52-0-release.
If you've been keeping a shell alias around just to pipe stdin into your workflows, this is the release that retires it. Mine is still in my dotfiles, but it's dead code now.
Disclosure: I'm a co-founder at Muvon and I work on Octomind. This is my personal writeup of what we shipped.
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