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Comment by eximius | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty great! The main thing you need for durable execution is 1) retries (absurd does this) 2) idempotency (absurd does this via steps - but would be better handled with the APIs themselves being idempotent, then not using steps. Though absurd would certainly _help_ mitigate some APIs not being idempotent, but not completely).

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> idempotency (absurd does this via steps - but would be better handled with the APIs themselves being idempotent, then not using steps

That is very hard to do with agents which are just all probabilistic. However if you do have an API that is either idempotent / uses idempotency keys you can derive an idempotency key from the task: const idempotencyKey = `${ctx.taskID}:payment`;

That said: many APIs that support the idempotency-key header only support replays of an hour to 24 hours, so for long running workflows you need to capture the state output anyways.

I was not thinking of the agent case specifically. But yes, you have to make the APIs idempotent, either with these step checkpoints or by wrapping the underlying API. It's not hard to make a postgres-transaction-based idempotency layer wrapper, then you can have a much longer idempotency TTL.

> so for long running workflows you need to capture the state output anyways.

That would be a _very_ long running workflow. Probably worth breaking up into different subtasks or, I guess as Absurd does it, step checkpoints.

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