When a CircleCI workflow kicks off async work — an external service, another pipeline, or any long-running process — there's no native way to get results back into the workflow and act on them.

The only signal a workflow can receive today is a binary approve/reject on a hold job, with no data attached. This means you can't pass results back in, you can't make decisions based on what happened, and if you poll for a response you're burning credits on idle compute.

Examples of where this comes up: security scans where you need to route based on severity rather than just pass/fail, ML model training that returns governance metrics and artifact locations, infrastructure provisioning where you need status before proceeding, and pipelines triggering other pipelines where context needs to carry back.

Customers today work around this by building callback Lambdas, persisting results to external stores, and writing retrieval logic in downstream jobs — custom glue infrastructure that shouldn't be necessary.

We'd love to hear from you on your use cases where you ran into this challenge: