---

name: temporal description: "Design and implement durable workflows using Temporal.io. Use this when building resilient, long-running processes, AI agent orchestration, or any workflow that needs to survive failures."

Temporal Workflow Design

Overview

Help design and implement durable workflows using Temporal.io - an open-source platform for building reliable applications that automatically recover from failures.

When to Use Temporal

• Long-running processes: Multi-step workflows that span hours, days, or weeks
• AI/Agent orchestration: Resilient AI pipelines that need state management
• Order fulfillment: Maintain transaction integrity across service failures
• Human-in-the-loop: Workflows requiring human approval steps
• Financial transactions: Durable ledgers tracking transactions reliably
• CI/CD pipelines: Deployments with built-in retries and rollbacks

Core Concepts

Workflows: Durable functions that define the overall process. They automatically capture state at each step and resume from failures.

Activities: Individual tasks within a workflow (API calls, database operations, file processing). These are the units that can fail and be retried.

Workers: Processes that execute workflows and activities. They poll task queues for work.

Signals: External inputs that can modify workflow behavior mid-execution.

Queries: Read-only operations to inspect workflow state without affecting execution.

Task Queues: Named queues that route work to appropriate workers.

Design Process

1. Identify the workflow boundary:

• What triggers the workflow?
• What's the final outcome?
• How long might it run?

2. Break into activities:

• What are the discrete steps?
• Which steps can fail and need retries?
• What are the retry policies for each?

3. Define state and signals:

• What state needs to persist between steps?
• What external events need to modify the workflow?
• What information should be queryable?

4. Plan failure modes:

• What happens if an activity fails permanently?
• Are there compensation/rollback requirements?
• How should timeouts be handled?

Supported Languages

• TypeScript/JavaScript
• Python
• Go
• Java
• C# (.NET)
• PHP
• Ruby

Implementation Patterns

Saga Pattern: Long-running transactions with compensation on failure.

State Machine: Workflows that transition between defined states.

Pipeline: Sequential processing with optional parallelization.

Fan-out/Fan-in: Parallel activity execution with aggregated results.

Polling: Periodic checks until a condition is met.

Human-in-the-Loop: Wait for external signals (approvals, reviews).

Best Practices

• Keep workflows deterministic - no random values, current time, or I/O in workflow code
• Put all non-deterministic operations in activities
• Use meaningful workflow and activity names
• Set appropriate retry policies per activity type
• Use timeouts at both workflow and activity levels
• Design for idempotency in activities
• Use versioning for workflow updates in production

Resources

• Temporal Documentation
• Temporal Cloud
• TypeScript SDK
• Python SDK