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Agentic AI
Planning & Control Flow
Event-Driven Agent
Trigger the agent on external events (webhooks, message queues, file changes) instead of user requests or schedules.
Intent & Description
🎯 Intent
Trigger the agent on external events (webhooks, message queues, file changes) instead of user requests or schedules.
📋 Context
A team operates an agent whose job is to react to things happening in the wider system — a pull request opened on a repository, a customer message arriving in a queue, a monitoring alert firing, a file appearing in a watched folder. The work should happen when the event occurs, not when a human remembers to ask and not on a fixed schedule.
💡 Solution
- Subscribe to the event source (webhook endpoint, message queue consumer, file watcher). - On each event: validate the payload, deduplicate (check for already-processed event IDs), and invoke the agent with the event payload as input. - Apply rate limiting to prevent burst overload. - Ensure idempotency so that duplicate deliveries produce the same outcome. - Acknowledge the event source only after successful agent processing.
Real-world Use Case
- An external event source (webhook, queue, file watcher) exists and pulling on a schedule wastes effort.
- Events can be validated, deduplicated, and processed idempotently.
- Acknowledgement after successful processing is supported by the event source.
Source
Advantages
- Timely action without polling cost.
- Composes with downstream automations naturally.
Disadvantages
- Event-source failures stop the agent silently.
- Idempotency is its own engineering investment.