Prompt Relay

ELI5 — The Vibe Check

Prompt relay is passing one AI call's output directly as the next call's input — the chain in prompt chaining, minus the human review. Step 1 generates an outline, the relay hands it to Step 2 which writes the draft, which gets relayed to Step 3 for editing. No human touch between steps. Fast and efficient when the pipeline works. A beautiful cascade of confident wrong answers when it doesn't.

Real Talk

Prompt relay is the automated hand-off mechanism in multi-step AI pipelines where the output of one LLM call becomes the input context for the next, without human validation in between. It's the fundamental building block of agentic pipelines in LangChain, LlamaIndex, and custom orchestration systems. Error propagation is the main risk — a hallucination in Step 1 propagates through every downstream step with no one to catch it.

When You'll Hear This

"The pipeline uses prompt relay — extraction feeds directly into the summarization step." / "Prompt relay is fast but you need validation checkpoints or errors compound."