I’m building my first multi-step workflow and want to get the basics right before I develop bad habits. What’s the clean way to take output from one step and use it in the next? I’m curious whether there’s a standard way to reference earlier results and how to keep that readable as a workflow grows. Examples of how people structure this would be really helpful.
Your instinct to get the fundamentals right early is a good one, it’s just that the fundamentals here (for Tines 3B) have moved.
In 3B you don’t wire outputs into inputs yourself. You describe what should happen and 3B builds the steps and the data flow between them, so there’s no reference syntax to learn and no formatting to keep tidy as things grow.
What matters instead is being clear about what you want. Rather than “pass the user ID to the next step,” say what the workflow should accomplish: “look up the user in Okta, then use their email to find their open tickets in Jira, and send me anything older than a week.” 3B works out what needs to travel between steps. If something comes out wrong, it’s almost always because the instruction left room for interpretation.
I wrote a series of short articles on getting good with 3B, including how to prompt it well, which is worth a read at this exact stage: Start here: getting good with Tines 3B.