Lobster Workflow Automation: The Agent Playbook

About This Guide

The Lobster Workflow Automation Guide teaches you how to build typed, multi-step automation pipelines with the Lobster framework for OpenClaw. Lobster uses a declarative step definition format where each step specifies its required inputs, expected outputs, and failure handling behavior, making pipelines deterministic and testable in isolation. The guide covers installing and configuring the Lobster runtime, defining workflow schemas in YAML, writing step handlers in Python, and wiring steps into a directed acyclic graph. You will learn how to add human-in-the-loop approval gates that pause execution and wait for confirmation before continuing, implement retry logic with exponential backoff for unreliable external API calls, run steps in parallel to reduce total execution time, and monitor running workflows in the Lobster dashboard. Real-world workflow examples covered include a lead enrichment pipeline, a content moderation workflow, and a multi-step data transformation job. Estimated time to a running workflow is 60-90 minutes.