System templates
ARDS ships with two catalogs of built-in workflows, and they play different roles. A gallery template is an example you clone and own; a sys- building block is a published workflow you embed. Everything else on this page hangs off that distinction.
Two kinds of built-ins
The template gallery holds 22 read-only templates. Each one shows, in workflow form, how a real platform flow is shaped — decomposition, review sweeps, incident handling. You can't run a template directly and you can't edit it in place: you Clone it, which gives you an editable Draft you own. From there it's an ordinary workflow — yours to rename, rewire and publish.
One thing templates are not: live wiring into the platform. Cloning Mission lifecycle and running your clone runs your graph — it does not execute or replace the platform's internal mission pipeline. Templates teach shape; they don't carry the machinery.
The sys- building blocks are different: 19 published workflows seeded into every tenant. You don't clone these to use them — you embed one by dropping its tile into your own graph as a sub-workflow reference. The embedded block runs inside your run, pauses at its own gates, and lands through your acceptance; it is composition, not a separate execution (see Anatomy of a workflow).
A few names appear in both catalogs — sys-run-acceptance is both a gallery template and a seeded block. Where you meet it tells you which one you're holding: the gallery clones, the palette embeds.
The template gallery
The 22 templates group under 9 categories. Clone any of them and read the graph node by node in the editor — that's what they're for.
Mission (6)
| Template | What it does |
|---|---|
Mission lifecycle (sys-mission-lifecycle) | The default flow: decompose the objective, approve the plan, fan out one coder per task, review the results. |
Decompose (direct) (sys-decompose-direct) | An approval gate, then a proposed task plan — the no-research variant. |
Decompose (research-first) (sys-decompose-research) | Parallel codebase/docs/web research, synthesized, then a task plan informed by the synthesis. |
Decompose (grounded coder) (sys-mission-decompose-grounded) | A repo-cloned coder creates the mission's tasks directly, each path verified against the clone. |
Research mission (sys-research-mission) | Read-only investigation: parallel research, then a bounded revise loop until the critic approves (max 3 passes). |
Task dispatch (sys-task-dispatch) | The per-task decision chain: resolve dependencies, check boundaries, route to the best agent, dispatch the coder. |
Onboarding (4)
| Template | What it does |
|---|---|
First-run onboarding wizard (sys-first-run-onboarding) | The five-act tenant bootstrap: providers, workspace, intent, a first mission and a policy check. |
Project onboarding (sys-project-onboarding) | Bootstraps a project charter with its 12 Matters, then reads back the charter progress. |
Aspect onboarding (sys-aspect-onboarding) | Fans out one mission per charter aspect, in charter order, each carrying the previous aspect's context. |
Intelligence scaffolding (sys-intelligence-scaffolding) | Generates a project scaffolding plan, then a decision gate: approve executes it, reject parks it. |
Ops (3)
| Template | What it does |
|---|---|
Batch processing (sys-batch-processing) | Creates a batch, fans out one process per chunk, waits for the completion event, aggregates the results. |
Canary (sys-canary) | Fans out one run per test case, analyzes the aggregate verdict and gates promotion to production. |
Run acceptance (physical) (sys-run-acceptance) | Physically drives the run's built target for every validation case — fail-closed — and gates the merge on the verdict. |
Compliance (2)
| Template | What it does |
|---|---|
Compliance assessment (sys-compliance-assess) | Fans out one infrastructure probe per framework control, then scores the results — probe-driven, no LLM. |
Incident pipeline (sys-incident-pipeline) | Registers an incident, classifies it through typed gate forms, tracks the regulator timeline and closes on root cause. |
Review (2)
| Template | What it does |
|---|---|
Review engine sweep (sys-review-engine) | Discovers review targets, fans out one review per target, submits a consolidated report. |
UX review (sys-ux-review) | Discovers pages, fans out one usability review per page, submits a consolidated report. |
Validation (2)
| Template | What it does |
|---|---|
LLM preset validation (sys-llm-preset-validation) | Resolves the preset × site grid, fans out one run per cell, evaluates the aggregate verdict. |
Validation runs (sys-validation-runs) | Runs prompt × model executions in parallel per model group, then finalizes the aggregate counters. |
Evaluation (1)
| Template | What it does |
|---|---|
Satisfaction scoring (sys-satisfaction-scoring) | Computes and persists a quality score for a completed mission. |
Improvement (1)
| Template | What it does |
|---|---|
Improvement cycle (sys-improvement-cycle) | Registers an improvement, validates it, then either implements the fix through a coder or rejects it early. |
Support (1)
| Template | What it does |
|---|---|
Support-case triage (sys-support-case-triage) | Investigates and classifies a reported case, then branches on the verdict: gate and fix a bug, or resolve the rest early. |
Cloning a template
- Open the template gallery from the workflow list.
- Pick a template and click Clone. You get a
Draftyou own — the template itself is untouched. - Rename the draft so it reads as yours, not as a system flow.
- Open it in the visual editor and make it yours: swap nodes, change gate instructions, rewire arms.
- Validate, then Publish. Publishing freezes the graph exactly as it does for a workflow you built from scratch — see the workflow lifecycle.
A clone is a copy, not a subscription: if the gallery template changes in a later release, your clone doesn't move. You can also clone in the other direction — from a mission that already ran — which is covered in The workflow lifecycle.
The sys- building blocks
The 19 seeded sys- workflows are published and versioned like any workflow of your own; they show up as ready-made tiles you can drop into a draft. Embedding one means your workflow calls it as a sub-workflow: it contributes its steps to your run, and its output lands through your acceptance like everything else in the graph.
Two you're likely to reach for:
sys-research-codebase— a read-only codebase investigation; a good grounding step before anything generative.sys-decompose-propose— the agentic task-plan proposal; embed it when your workflow should propose an ordered task plan the way the platform does.
Most of the 19 exist to serve the platform's own seeded flows. You're free to embed any of them, but you never need one — a workflow built entirely from palette nodes is just as legitimate.