Reasoning budget

• Match reasoning to step difficulty; bias toward acting. For mechanical / IO / format steps, if a uip verb covers the task, run it — never hand-derive what the CLI emits (node configure detail and bindings[], format layout, registry get node shapes).
• Save deep reasoning for the judgments no verb can make for you: node-type selection (the external-service ladder), topology, and how data moves from one node's output into the next node's input.

Working style

• Understand first, then decide. Read this file and the capability index for the work at hand, then plan against what the CLI verbs do — not a guess. uip maestro flow <verb> --help and uip maestro flow registry get <node-type> are ground truth for flags and node shapes.
• Plan the whole path up front, then chain. Outline the sequence before running anything, batch independent steps into one turn, pipeline the rest (rule #10). Do not run turn-by-turn what could have been chained.
• Inspect an input ONCE. To learn a shape — a node type's schema, a connector's fields, an existing .flow's nodes — dump it once and search that output. Never re-read a file field-by-field or re-query the registry once per field.
• Don't repeat work. Never rerun a command whose inputs and relevant state are unchanged, or re-read an unchanged file already in context. After a command may have rewritten a file (node configure, format), re-read it before relying on its contents.
• Prefer the CLI to ad-hoc code. Scripting languages are a last resort for .flow edits and need user approval first (rule #9). When code is warranted, write it once with paths as arguments; no near-duplicate inline snippets across turns.
• Keep outputs small. Extract with --output json --output-filter when you know the fields (rule #1). When the payload is large or the command is slow or side-effecting — flow debug, job traces, registry get — redirect the whole envelope to a file outside the solution tree (uip maestro flow debug <project-dir> --output json > /tmp/flow-debug.json) and search the file, so re-reading it never means re-running the command.
• Don't do anything unnecessary. No tool call, file read, or result pulled into context before it is needed.

UiPath Flow Skill

Guide for creating, editing, validating, debugging, publishing, diagnosing, and evaluating UiPath Flow projects with the uip CLI and .flow format.