Hacker News Reader

Comment by Flux159 | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on launching! From your explanation comparing to traditional workflow engines it would be a step up from something like Airflow, but I was wondering about a comparison to Temporal which does let you create dynamic DAGs as well as provides some additional guarantees around reliability of workers in case of crashes.

View on HN

Thanks! Yep, retry and durability guarantee is on the roadmap for sure, I also wanted to start working on the serverless offering. What kind of workflows are you building with temporal?

I'm working on building out an AI agent right now - looking through autogen, langgraph and other current frameworks along with just building my own logic on top of a workflow orchestrator.

The ReAct paradigm for agents makes me think of standard workflows because they're not that different conceptually: Read the state of the world, plan / "reason" based on user intent, perform actions that mutate, then go back and read the state of the world if problem hasn't been fully solved (ie start another workflow). Similar in concept from reading from dbs, computing logic, mutating / writing to new table, trigger follow on job from data engineering.

Totally agree, I encourage you to give Flow a try! Would be more than happy to help you onboard. Also would love to hear if anything is missing.

Hey, I’m building agents on top of temporal as well. One of the main limitations is child workflows can not spawn other child workflows. Are you doing an activity for every prompt execution and passing those through other activities? Or something more framework-y?

Right now I'm doing prompt execution in activities, passing results to other activities.

Workflows currently only started after human events, but going to move towards additional workflows started through an activity soon - I'm keeping the state of the world independent of the execution engine so each workflow will read the new state.

Have you hit any non-determinism errors keeping workflow state outside temporal?

Prefect is also a non-DAG based workflow engine that has very similar functionality to what is outlined here; they have built a few tools in the AI space (marvin and controlflow iirc)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com