Idempotent Document Processing in Distributed Pipeline Architectures
Document pipelines need idempotency engineered separately at each processing stage.
Marcus Lien
Section
8 stories in Agent Pipeline.
Document pipelines need idempotency engineered separately at each processing stage.
Document extraction needs different reliability patterns than payment webhooks.
External state management, not bigger models, fixes multi-page document reasoning in production.
Schema design matters more than model choice for extraction accuracy past a few dozen fields.
Routing low-confidence extractions prevents review queues from becoming bottlenecks.
System design, not model quality, determines whether document pipelines hold up in production.
Structured tool-calling architecture beats monolithic LLM prompts for production document workflows.
Misclassified documents and missed fallbacks sink pipelines faster than bad parsing.