Decision Table Orchestration: Replace Autonomous Agent Decision-Making with a 36-Row State → Action Map

Medium (Wasowski)·high signal

Rather than letting an agent autonomously decide next steps, the author maps all pipeline states to explicit actions in a decision table (state × condition → action + execution mode: AUTO / HITL / MANUAL). This makes pipeline behavior fully deterministic and auditable — any unexpected state is visible as a missing row rather than an opaque agent choice. Combined with an append-only immutable state log (global status.json + per-episode action logs), agents can resume interrupted runs without guessing current state. The pattern proved more reliable than autonomous orchestration for pipelines with more than ~10 distinct states.