Task Queue
A waiting line of jobs for agents to pick up and work through one at a time.
Think of it like
The ticket-number system at a deli — jobs get served in order as someone becomes free.
Example
Incoming support tickets land in a queue, and whichever agent worker is idle grabs the next one to handle.
How it actually works
A task queue decouples producing work from doing it, which is what lets you scale agents horizontally — add more workers to drain a deep queue. It also gives you natural retry and prioritization points. The classic pitfalls are the same as any queue: jobs that never finish, poison items that crash every worker, and backlogs that grow faster than you can clear them.
For product teams
Queues are how you smooth bursty demand and scale agent throughput without dropping work on the floor.
For engineers
A buffer decoupling job producers from agent consumers, enabling parallelism, retries, and prioritization.
Related
- Manager-Worker — A pattern that feeds work into the queue.
- Event Loop — The loop that pulls jobs off it.
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