Queue

Your agents can work fast. They can't work everywhere at once.

A queue is the line for work that has to wait its turn.

Think about the order printer in a busy restaurant kitchen. Saturday at 8pm, tickets are coming in faster than the line can cook. They don't arrive and immediately become food. They go on the rail — a physical queue. Each ticket hangs there until a cook is free, then gets pulled when it's time. The kitchen works through them in order. Nobody's skipped. Nothing falls through the floor. The work waits until it can be done properly.

That rail is a queue. Software uses the exact same idea.

What a queue actually does:

A queue holds work in an ordered line and releases it when a worker is ready. Three properties that make this matter:

1. It doesn't lose things. An item enters the queue and stays there until it's handled. The kitchen closes, you restart, whatever — that ticket is still on the rail.

2. It controls flow. Without a queue, if 500 people sign up in a minute, your system tries to process all 500 at once and falls over. With a queue, those 500 items form a line. You handle them at the rate you actually can. Calm kitchen. Same work done.

3. It decouples the thing that creates work from the thing that does it. The host stand doesn't cook. The kitchen doesn't seat people. The order moves between them via the rail, and neither side has to care what the other is doing at any given moment.

The pattern you'll see everywhere once you know it.

Every form submission that processes in the background: queue. Every email send batched through an email platform: queue. Every time something says "processing" instead of "done" — there's usually a queue in the middle.

When an agent workflow breaks and jobs are "stuck" or "piling up," the word that describes what you're looking at is a backed-up queue. The line is long, the kitchen is slow, or the cooks stopped showing up. Once you can name it, you know what question to ask next.

The line doesn't judge the work. It just holds it until someone's ready.