Table of Contents
Which Workflow Pattern Fits a Multi-Step Research Pipeline with Claude?
Learn why chaining is the ideal workflow pattern for research pipelines where Claude extracts topics, generates questions, and answers them sequentially.
Question
You’re building a research pipeline where Claude first extracts topics from a document, then generates questions about each topic, then answers those questions. Which workflow pattern fits this task?
A. Parallelization
B. Chaining – each step feeds into the next
C. Routing
D. No workflow needed, use a single prompt
Answer
B. Chaining – each step feeds into the next
Explanation
In a research pipeline where Claude must first extract topics from a document (Step 1), then generate questions about those specific topics (Step 2), and finally answer the generated questions (Step 3), the chaining workflow pattern is the perfect fit because each subsequent step requires the output from the previous step as input. The extracted topics become the foundation for question generation, and the questions become the basis for answering, creating a sequential dependency chain: Document → Topics → Questions → Answers, where parallelization wouldn’t work (since steps aren’t independent) and routing adds unnecessary complexity for a linear process.