Workflows

Beginner — Deterministic versus agentic workflow?

• Deterministic transitions follow defined code and recorded outcomes.
• Agentic transitions delegate some next-step choices to a model.
• I use AI for language uncertainty and deterministic control for business invariants.

Intermediate — Why is idempotency important?

• Retries can happen after a successful effect but before the response arrives.
• A scoped operation key and payload hash let the service return the same receipt instead of creating another claim or sending another email.

Senior — Temporal or BullMQ?

• I use a queue for isolated background jobs and a durable workflow platform for long-lived coordination, timers, and human events when justified.
• BullMQ still needs explicit business lifecycle records; Temporal still needs idempotent activities and deterministic workflow logic.

Scenario — Submission timed out. Should you retry?

• First classify the outcome as potentially unknown.
• Query or reconcile the external receipt by operation key, then retry only under a documented idempotency contract.
• Reporting failure immediately could encourage duplicate customer submissions.