Essentially, you don't need to think about time and space. You just write more or less normal looking code, using the Temporal SDK. Except it actually can resume from arbitrarily long pauses, waiting as long as it needs to for some signal, without any special effort beyond using the SDK. You also automatically get great observability into all running workflows, seeing inputs and outputs at each step, etc.

The cost of this is that you have to be careful in creating new versions of the workflow that are backwards compatible, and it's hard to understand backcompat requirements and easy to mess up. And, there's also additional infra you need, to run the Temporal server. Temporal Cloud isn't cheap at scale but does reduce that burden.

helpful - thanks! I have played with temporal a bit but have this thought that since most AI tools represent state as just a rolling context window, maybe you don't have to serialize and entire call stack and you can cut a bunch of corners.

but we're all probably better off not investing that wheel