Setting Up a CUA Workflow

Workflow Design Principles

Before building a CUA workflow, establish:

1. Task definition — What exactly should the agent do? Be specific.
2. Success criteria — How do you know the task is complete?
3. Failure conditions — What should happen if something goes wrong?
4. Human touchpoints — Where does a human need to review before continuing?
5. Rollback plan — Can the agent undo actions if needed?

Vague tasks produce unreliable results. Every ambiguity in the task definition is a potential failure point.

Choosing an Execution Environment

For most production use, a cloud browser environment is safest — it's isolated from your production systems and can be destroyed and recreated easily.

Writing Effective Task Instructions

Treat CUA instructions like operator instructions for a new employee:

Task: Collect competitor pricing from these 5 websites: [list]

For each site:

1. Navigate to the pricing page
2. Identify all plan tiers and prices
3. Note if prices are monthly or annual
4. Record currency
5. Note any "contact sales" tiers (mark as "custom pricing")

Output: A CSV with columns: site, plan_name, price, billing_period, currency

If you can't find pricing on a site, note it as "pricing not public" rather than guessing.

Checkpoint Design

For long tasks, build in checkpoints where the agent saves progress:

After completing each site, save the partial data. If the agent fails on site 4, it can resume from site 4 rather than starting over.

Monitoring and Logging

Production CUA workflows should log:

• Every action taken with timestamp
• Every screenshot (or at least key decision points)
• Errors encountered and recovery attempts
• Final output and success/failure status

This audit trail is essential for debugging failures and improving reliability.