← All posts
Engineering1 Sep · 6 min read

The rule-based workflow engine, explained

Triggers, conditions and actions in plain language — no model in the loop, no black box, every run logged so you can see exactly why a thread moved.

AbdelmjidAbdelmjidBuilding InbxerCopy link

The workflow engine is the part of Inbxer that automates the routine handling — the stuff a human shouldn't have to do by hand forty times a day. It's deliberately not AI. Triggers, conditions and actions, evaluated the same way every time, so you can predict what it'll do before it does it.

Triggers, conditions, actions

A rule fires on a trigger — a channel, a tag, an account tier, an SLA state change — checks conditions that compose without needing a rules-engine PhD, and then runs one or more actions: assign, escalate, tag, notify.

IF account.tier = enterprise AND tag = outage DO assign -> on-call DO page #sev-support

Every run is logged

Automation that moves a thread without leaving a trace is a debugging nightmare six months later. Every rule execution is logged against the thread it touched, so "why did this get assigned to me" always has an answer.

Where it stops on purpose

This is the boring, deterministic half of automation in Inbxer — the AI agents handle the parts that need judgment, like drafting a reply or reading tone. The workflow engine handles the parts that don't: routing, escalation, and the repeat work nobody wants to do by hand.

Read the source
Everything in this post is in the repository — MIT licensed, self-hostable today.
Open the repo