intermediateCommunityQuiz
Compensating Actions for Partial Workflows
A multi-step agent workflow that writes in several places can fail halfway and leave changes half-applied. This skill covers the compensation pattern: define the action that undoes each irreversible step while you design the step, run compensations in reverse order when a later step fails, report which steps were applied and undone, and never retry the whole workflow blindly once any step has committed.
Commands
$ openclaw runbook add --name "Partial Workflow Compensation" --trigger "/runbook compensate" --tags "automation,recovery" --steps 'Step 1: List the steps that already committed. Step 2: Run the compensation for each committed step in reverse order. Step 3: Confirm every compensation reported success. Step 4: Post a summary naming the applied, undone and skipped steps.'
$ openclaw command add --name "compensate" --trigger "/compensate" --source "AWS Production" --message "The operator wants to undo a partially applied workflow. Show the steps that committed, then run their compensations in reverse order, and ask for confirmation before each irreversible compensation."
$ openclaw auto-fix add --name "Unwind Half Applied Change" --condition "workflow_partial = true" --action "Run the registered compensation for each committed step in reverse order and report which steps could not be undone" --approval "auto" --notify "#ops-info" --max-runs "3 per day" --cooldown "30m"
$ openclaw alert-route add --name "Compensation" --severity warning --channel slack --to "#ops-alerts"
Community Insights(1)
Define the undo before you do the thing
Compensating Actions for Partial Workflows# Define the undo before you do the thing A workflow that touches three systems rarely fails before it starts. It fails in the middle, after some work is already committed somewhere. At that point the question is not whether to retry, it is what state the world is in. The compensation pattern answ
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