Patterns track of the Automation series. Where Automation Foundations taught the primitives — tool calls, side effects, idempotency awareness — Patterns adds the reliability layer that turns one-off scripts into automations that survive retries, restarts, partial failures, and unattended scheduled runs. 30 lessons across 4 weeks. Requires Automation Foundations. Pro tier. Week 1 — Multi-step chains and branching: 3-step chains, data-shape mapping between tools, conditional routing, aggregation, partition, specific error classes. Week 2 — Reliability primitives: retry with exponential backoff, idempotency prediction, dedup keys, state across runs (read/write to a Sheet), partial-failure handling, structured logging. Week 3 — Schedule-safe production patterns: "would this run at 9am every day?" mindset, incremental processing using last-run state, failure self-alerts, configuration extraction, pre-flight validation, full synthesis. Week 4 — Patterns at scale: pagination over many pages, streaming-style read+process, response caching, chained transformations, multi-tool orchestration with reusable helpers, and a final reliable-chain synthesis. Lessons demonstrate ONE pattern at a time on the smallest possible generic input — minimum-demonstration only, no "weekly status report" framing.
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
