# How Whatnot Built Atlas to Represent and Automate Support SOPs as Code

DevFeed: [How Whatnot Built Atlas to Represent and Automate Support SOPs as Code](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/your-sops-are-already-code-you-just-can-t-run-them-yet-23717.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://medium.com/whatnot-engineering/your-sops-are-already-code-you-just-cant-run-them-yet-789e3e055455?source=rss----162aeca881b0---4>)

Author: Whatnot Engineering

Published: 2026-03-10T15:01:01Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Whatnot Engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/whatnot-engineering.md>)

Topics: [Code](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/code.md>), [Automation](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/automation.md>), [Graphs](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/graphs.md>), [Python](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/python.md>)

Tags: [ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai.md>), [ai-agent](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-agent.md>), [automation](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/automation.md>), [code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/code.md>), [customer-experience](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/customer-experience.md>), [graph](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/graph.md>), [graphs](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/graphs.md>), [python](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/python.md>), [trust](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/trust.md>)

## AI overview

Whatnot describes Atlas, a workflow execution and automation engine that represents support procedures as directed graphs in code using a small Python DSL. The team first formalized workflows as manual agent-guided steps before adding automation.

## Source excerpt

Your SOPs Are Already Code... You Just Can't Run Them Yet Paul Gut | CX & Trust Engineering Every support org has them: thousands of pages of branching, conditional logic scattered across flowcharts, docs, and the heads of your most tenured agents. "If the label's been generated, check the tracking status; if it shows delivered, verify the address on file..." The Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) grow until they can no longer be managed. And when you're the fastest-growing live commerce platform in history, it all catches up with you even faster. At Whatnot, our agents handle everything from shipping questions on vintage sneaker orders to address changes on trading card shipments. Until recently, they were spending the majority of their time on work that required no human insight, like checking order prices, validating addresses, looking up tracking statuses -- routine data checks interspersed with the actual decision-making. Even worse, our more experienced agents had memorized the SOPs and stopped referencing them altogether, which made propagating even the slightest changes a nightmare. We needed SOPs to behave like code: automatable, deployable, version-controlled. And there's no better way to make something behave like code than to simply turn it into code. So in mid-2025, we built Atlas: our new workflow execution and automation engine. Formalize first, automate later The idea behind Atlas is simple: for every ticket, the engine traverses a directed graph of nodes, eventually reaching a resolution the agent can execute. The graph is represented in code (more on that decision later). For every ticket, the engine traverses a directed graph of nodes, eventually reaching a resolution the agent can execute. We built a small Python DSL to represent these graphs. Each node could be a decision ("Has a label been generated for this order?"), an action ("Generate a shipping label"), or a resolution ("Send the label to the user"). We also made data points -- reusable pieces