Durable agent orchestration with Temporal
Your agent started with one job. Now it has more tools, more instructions, and several teams making changes. How do you decide what belongs together and what needs to run separately?
This white paper follows a customer-operations agent as it grows, showing how to define specialist boundaries, coordinate the parts with Temporal, and keep requests moving through crashes, retries, and human approvals.
Loading form...
Here’s what you’ll learn
When your agent needs a specialist
Identify the changes in responsibility, permissions, scaling, and ownership that justify a separate capability, and recognize when better internal structure is enough.
How to recover an interrupted request
Understand how recorded Activity results, durable waits, and idempotency preserve progress through restarts and retries, even when an approval arrives days later.
Which Temporal primitive fits the job
Compare Activities, Child Workflows, and Nexus Operations, then match each capability to the state it owns, its lifecycle, and the team operating it.
What to test before the first incident
Get a practical test plan for interrupted runs, missing responses, and late decisions, with clear checks for repeated work, duplicate writes, and failure isolation.
Why this matters
Every split has a cost
Another agent introduces another contract to maintain and another failure to handle. A useful boundary gives a capability clearer ownership, a smaller context, or the isolation it needs.
Starting over gets expensive
An interrupted run can repeat research, pay for the same model output twice, or resend a message. Recording completed work and protecting external writes makes recovery safer and less wasteful.
Isolation needs more than a diagram
Separate prompts can still share credentials, capacity, and failure modes. The paper connects each architectural decision to the controls that enforce it, from scoped credentials to dedicated Worker fleets and Namespaces.
