Week of January 25, 2026

Recipe System
Maturation

51 commits across 2 repos in one week, making the recipe engine production-ready with provider resilience, convergence loops, and validation tooling

amplifier-bundle-recipes & amplifier-foundation

Active

The Problem

Recipes Needed
Production Hardening

The recipe system worked for single-provider, local-only scenarios. Production use cases demanded more.

🔗

Single Provider

No fallback if a provider was unavailable. A single API outage stopped the entire workflow.

🖥️

Local-Only Paths

Path resolution used Path.cwd(), which returned the server directory in web deployments — not the user's project.

🔄

Fixed Iteration

Loops required a known count upfront. No support for "iterate until converged" patterns needed for meta-learning workflows.

The Solution

Three Infrastructure
Upgrades

⛓️

Provider Fallback Chains

Ordered list of provider/model preferences per step. System tries each until one responds. Haiku → GPT-4o-mini, Sonnet → GPT-4o.

Commits: d79e57c, f2c0ff4, 984812b

📂

Working Directory Resolution

Recipes now query session.working_dir capability, falling back to Path.cwd(). Enables server/web deployments.

Commits: 0e01493, eaf0997

🎯

Convergence-Based Loops

New while_condition, break_when, and update_context fields. Iterate until a quality threshold is met, not a fixed count.

Commit: d28d224

Evidence

amplifier-bundle-recipes: 5 commits, Jan 25–28

Jan 25 feat: use session.working_dir capability for path resolution (#15) Brian Krabach

Jan 25 refactor: use foundation's ProviderPreference for provider/model selection Brian Krabach

Jan 25 refactor: remove dead model_resolver.py (context poisoning cleanup) Brian Krabach

Jan 27 feat: add provider_preferences list for fallback provider chains momuno

Jan 28 feat: add convergence-based loops for meta-learning patterns Sam Schillace

The Bigger Picture

amplifier-foundation: 46 commits, same week

Brian Krabach drove a parallel sprint in foundation with recipe-related infrastructure, validation tooling, and documentation.

Provider Preferences

Foundation-level ProviderPreference type and resolve_model_pattern(), shared across all modules including recipes.

Validation Recipes

New validate-agents recipe (initial → v1.2.4) and validate-bundle-repo (→ v2.0.1), both with deterministic classification. Jan 31–Feb 1.

Delegate Tool

Two-parameter context inheritance for agent delegation (PR #44). Enables recipes to control how much context sub-agents receive.

Velocity

Development velocity

51

Commits (5 + 46)

2

Repositories

4

Contributors

7,440

Lines added

Primary contributor: Brian Krabach (45 of 51 commits, ~88%).
Other contributors: Diego Colombo (4), momuno (1), Sam Schillace (1).

Usage

Provider fallback chains in recipe YAML

# Each step can specify an ordered fallback list
steps:
  - id: analyze-content
    agent: "foundation:zen-architect"
    provider_preferences:
      - provider: anthropic
        model: claude-haiku-*
      - provider: openai
        model: gpt-4o-mini
    prompt: |
      Analyze the content structure...

  - id: generate-output
    agent: "foundation:modular-builder"
    # Convergence loop: iterate until quality threshold
    while_condition: "quality_score < 0.9"
    break_when: "iterations > 5"
    update_context:
      quality_score: "{{step_result.score}}"

Sources

Research Methodology

Data as of: February 20, 2026

Feature status: Active

Research performed:

Git log: cd amplifier-bundle-recipes && git log --since="2026-01-25" --until="2026-02-01" --no-merges (5 commits)
Git log: cd amplifier-foundation && git log --since="2026-01-25" --until="2026-02-01" --no-merges (46 commits)
Contributors: git log --format="%an" | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
Line counts: git log --shortstat (7,440 added / 1,092 removed)
File search: find amplifier-bundle-recipes -name "*document*" -o -name "*generation*" (no document-generation recipe found)
Tag search: git tag --sort=-creatordate (no version tags exist)
Week comparison: 2 commits prior week, 5 target week, 0 following week (recipes repo)

Gaps & corrections from prior version: A previous version of this deck described a "document generation recipe v7.0→v8.0" that does not exist in the repository. It claimed "40% faster execution" and "30% cost reduction" with no benchmarks or baselines. Those claims have been removed. This version reports only git-verifiable data.

Primary contributor: Brian Krabach (~88% of commits across both repos)

Repos: microsoft/amplifier-bundle-recipes, microsoft/amplifier-foundation

Try It

Ready to Use

Provider fallback chains and convergence loops are live in the recipe system

# Recipe bundle
github.com/microsoft/amplifier-bundle-recipes

# Foundation (shared infrastructure)
github.com/microsoft/amplifier-foundation

Recipe SystemMaturation

Recipes NeededProduction Hardening