alt Hacker NewsI started setting up my workflows using Temporal. It deploys as relatively light weight local app. For an isolated local installation it uses SQLite. It makes the process of dealing with API retries and organizing workflows and tasks really simple. I recommend giving it a try. It is, philosophically, exactly what this article is suggesting, but it adds an incredibly rich and flexible interface for agents to work with. Additionally, the web UI makes it very easy to inspect workflows, review agent execution, etc. Temporal also encodes much higher reliability into your system, almost for free. Distributed and reliable systems are hard, don't reinvent the wheel IMO.
If you find yourself wanting things like an easy way to then introspect your SQLite database, figure out what is happening in the workflow, compose individual tasks, make workflows trivially callable, etc, give Temporal a look.
Alongside this, I have mostly moved away from files for agents. Markdown and JSON are great, but also feel like traps when building out smaller local apps. LLMs are great at SQLite and you can render anything you want out of it (Markdown, JSON, etc). It saves a lot of tokens when an agent can just query a specific row instead of having to fire up jq or grep through markdown. You get a nice portable self contained data management system that encourages agents to be more disciplined about how they structure their data than a bunch of files. It also continues to scale into MySQL/Postgres if your little local projects start to outgrow or become more formal, you already have schema and discipline around data.
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Word on HN is that you're either paying more money than you expected for temporal's managed solution or taking on substantial ops burden ultimately running their very heavy system yourself.
I wouldn't know, I've not done either, but I'd like to learn more from your or other's experience.
My current client has a forest of 90+ SnapLogic pipelines that were badly written and maintained even worse; one of those was completely wrong, in that it generated wrong accounting data which could eventually have financial, fiducial and legal repercussions.
I rewrote the pipeline in Python (a correct version of it) with state management in SQLite and logs in plain old flat files, and everything has been running smoothly ever since. In fact this is the only data flow that has worked without errors or interruptions in the last six months.
Instead of replicating the db file with Litestream I do a remote backup with Restic before and after each run; it's not an exact replacement of Litestream as we could possibly lose a whole run if the machine died / disappeared at the end of a run, but it lets one restore any day very easily. In an ideal world I think we should have both (live replica + backups).
This reads like an advertisement for Temporal :)
Could you give an example of a case where you'd use SQLite instead of jq or grep through Markdown?
Interesting about the files vs db approach. I have been going back and fourth. I landed on db as well.
> It saves a lot of tokens when an agent can just query a specific row instead of having to fire up jq or grep through markdown
Just wanted to make sure no one missed this point in your comment because eventually users will be paying the full cost for tokens instead of VC's paying, with GitHub Copilot's pricing realignment leading the way.
It sounds like you’re running this mostly on a single machine? Temporal gets much more complex with scale. Cassandra isn’t fun to manage. Ringpop and TChannel are hard to debug when things go wrong. The SQL backend support doesn’t support horizontally scaled replicas (just single instance) due to consistency requirements. Depending on how your code is written, modifying code baked into workflows becomes complex, as anything that modifies the history event ordering breaks determinism in already-deployed workers.
We use it heavily and everyone who started on it doing simple scripting/automation all love it, everyone who built real production systems on top of it all hate it. Possibly operator error, but my experience hasn’t matched the rosy picture painted in these comments.