This reads like an advertisement for Temporal :)

I'm someone else who has inherited a bunch of ad-hoc orchestration systems and also used Temporal quite heavily. The latter does certainly come with some overhead (not so bad in the age of LLMs), but it also guides you along a well-trodden path of good practices. The latter being very important - it means that when you want to take on more advanced capabilities, you probably haven't painted yourself into a corner too badly and can take that on fairly easily. Think: retries, multi-tenancy, multi-lang, observability, etc.

Low key amazing tech, kinda like clickhouse - nobody is bragging it’s running their business

Well, just my experience. I installed it, had my agents configure it and it immediately solved problems I had with very little friction. Dealing with long running, long horizon agentic tasks that need very high reliability so I don’t have to babysit. I vibed the first version, realized I was reinventing reliable distributed systems. Stopped vibing and started surveying for something that fit :)

I can vouch for them too, being a super early adopter. One of the best early bets I've ever made. Awesome OSS product, glad the team decided to leave Uber to commercialize it.