{"slug": "temporal", "name": "Temporal", "category": "infra", "category_name": "Infrastructure and DevOps", "description": "Open-source durable execution platform for orchestrating reliable, long-running workflows in code.", "recommenders": 6, "commenters": 13, "warners": 1, "score": 6.026, "rising": 0.69, "first": "2026-01-03", "latest": "2026-09-14", "why": "Liked as a durable workflow engine that handles retries and failure recovery reliably in production, and as a foundation for running AI agents.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 6, "neutral": 4, "compare": 3, "warn": 1}, "spark": [0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 2, 0], "listed": true, "loved": ["Agent foundation", "Durable reliability"], "caveat": "Long-running updates", "short_quote": "Pretty big fan of Temporal. Been using the polyfill for a while.", "icon": true, "domain": null, "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://temporal.io", "pricing": "open source", "aliases": ["Temporal"], "verdict": [{"text": "Liked as a durable workflow engine that handles retries and failure recovery reliably in production,", "cites": [{"id": 795172448, "item_id": 49698278, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49698278", "by": "staticautomatic", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Also having a unified control plane is handy even at a pretty small scale", "excerpt": "I think scale is less important than other considerations. For me the biggest motivator is when the use case prefers doing something exactly-once, the downside risk of failure is high, and robust failure handling is moderately complex. The canonical example I use is healthcare communications; others use payment/fulfillment. Also having a unified control plane is handy even at a pretty small scale if your alternative ", "context": "", "use_case": "exactly-once workflow orchestration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation"}, {"id": 773233936, "item_id": 48327121, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48327121", "by": "bitexploder", "date": "2026-05-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I recommend giving it a try.", "excerpt": "I started setting up my workflows using Temporal. It deploys as relatively light weight local app. For an isolated local installation it uses SQLite. It makes the process of dealing with API retries and organizing workflows and tasks really simple. I recommend giving it a try. It is, philosophically, exactly what this article is suggesting, but it adds an incredibly rich and flexible interface for agents to work with", "context": "", "use_case": "agent workflow orchestration", "switched_from": "", "story": "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"}, {"id": 747177090, "item_id": 46698568, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46698568", "by": "jaskirat05", "date": "2026-01-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Temporal for workflow orchestration (overkill for hobby use, but rock solid for production)", "excerpt": "Hey HN, I built this to scratch my own itch. I have an RTX 3070 so just 8gb of VRAM I use ComfyUI for image/video generation, but running multi-step pipelines was painful: - No way to chain small step workflows (image \u2192 edit \u2192 video) without manual intervention - If step 3 of 5 failed, start over - No approval gates to review outputs mid-pipeline - Single GPU bottleneck ComfyAutomate fixes this with: **Chain definiti", "context": "", "use_case": "workflow orchestration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: OpenHiggs \u2013 Chain ComfyUI workflows with approvals and load balancing"}, {"id": 795160336, "item_id": 49697521, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49697521", "by": "adamgordonbell", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Temporal's idea is to factor that part out, the queues and retries, and offsetting actions", "excerpt": "Say you've got a process that spans a bunch of services and touches the real world. Some ecommerce check out for example. You need to reserve some inventory, charge a card, eventually email a customer and steps can go wrong. So you have queues, and retries and ways to back things out, undo changes. To my understanding, Temporal's idea is to factor that part out, the queues and retries, and offsetting actions, so you ", "context": "", "use_case": "workflow orchestration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation"}]}, {"text": " and as a foundation for running AI agents.", "cites": [{"id": 795171488, "item_id": 49698218, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49698218", "by": "Syntaf", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Absolutely love temporal", "excerpt": "Absolutely love temporal, but pretty shocked to see they have a $12.55B valuation.... feels nuts? We're using temporal as the foundation for agents running on our platform doing accounting work for clients, it's proven extremely effective and I love how durable workflows are within temporal. +100 on the technology, but realizing they are also VC funded makes me a little more cautious when it comes to vendor lock in.", "context": "runs agents on platform doing accounting work", "use_case": "durable workflows for accounting agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation"}, {"id": 782235553, "item_id": 48889722, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48889722", "by": "lukebuehler", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "the best substrate for these kind of agents are durable workflow engines. I'm currently supporting Temporal.", "excerpt": "A self-hostable Claude Tag or OAI Work [0]. A while ago, I realized that most new agent harnesses being built must be hosted on your machine or on a VM--in other words the agent needs a full OS process at all times. But we do not have good harnesses being built that are multi-tenant, do not use compute while they are paused, but are are still as powerful as, say, Claude Code or Codex, OpenClaw. So I set out to build ", "context": "", "use_case": "durable workflow engine for agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"}, {"id": 756904769, "item_id": 47306548, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47306548", "by": "stereobit", "date": "2026-03-09", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "A lightweight framework on top of Temporal", "excerpt": "A lightweight framework on top of Temporal for building reliable, stateful AI agents on top of temporal. Think OpenClaw, but durable, with long-term state, and enterprise-ready. We've been using it internally to build agents for a while now and have decided to open-source it. https://github.com/bead-ai/zeitlich", "context": "", "use_case": "workflow engine base", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"}, {"id": 761217986, "item_id": 47576124, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47576124", "by": "jaboostin", "date": "2026-03-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Temporal for all sorts of workflows and crons that it builds on its own", "excerpt": "My friends and I have been running a similar homegrown system on a VM at home: Claude Code in a GNU screen managed by systemd, Cloudflare tunnels, Graphiti memory system, a Discord channel plugged into Claude to drive it, and Temporal for all sorts of workflows and crons that it builds on its own. It arrived at the same incredibly fun behavior as you talk about in the readme, where the agent just builds all sorts of ", "context": "", "use_case": "workflows and crons", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Phantom \u2013 Open-source AI agent on its own VM that rewrites its config"}]}, {"text": " Caveats include painful workarounds for long-running workflows that are updated mid-execution,", "cites": [{"id": 768342993, "item_id": 48021437, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48021437", "by": "_alphageek", "date": "2026-05-05", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Temporal is a great tool, covering most of the use cases, but for long-running execution, solution around it is starting to be very painful and too complex.", "excerpt": "Hi HN, TBH, it is my first post here and I am nervous a lot, as I put a lot of effort into this product. I have been building http://orch8.io for past 2 months. The story started when I used Temporal for long-running workflows, month after month/many months/years, and ended up in a situation where I needed to write lots of fixes around Temporal. Temporal is a great tool, covering most of the use cases, but for long-r", "context": "", "use_case": "long-running workflows", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Orch8 \u2013 Durable workflow engine in Rust, one binary, Postgres or SQLite"}]}, {"text": " overkill for hobby use, and worries about vendor lock-in.", "cites": [{"id": 747177090, "item_id": 46698568, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46698568", "by": "jaskirat05", "date": "2026-01-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Temporal for workflow orchestration (overkill for hobby use, but rock solid for production)", "excerpt": "Hey HN, I built this to scratch my own itch. I have an RTX 3070 so just 8gb of VRAM I use ComfyUI for image/video generation, but running multi-step pipelines was painful: - No way to chain small step workflows (image \u2192 edit \u2192 video) without manual intervention - If step 3 of 5 failed, start over - No approval gates to review outputs mid-pipeline - Single GPU bottleneck ComfyAutomate fixes this with: **Chain definiti", "context": "", "use_case": "workflow orchestration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: OpenHiggs \u2013 Chain ComfyUI workflows with approvals and load balancing"}, {"id": 795171488, "item_id": 49698218, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49698218", "by": "Syntaf", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Absolutely love temporal", "excerpt": "Absolutely love temporal, but pretty shocked to see they have a $12.55B valuation.... feels nuts? We're using temporal as the foundation for agents running on our platform doing accounting work for clients, it's proven extremely effective and I love how durable workflows are within temporal. +100 on the technology, but realizing they are also VC funded makes me a little more cautious when it comes to vendor lock in.", "context": "runs agents on platform doing accounting work", "use_case": "durable workflows for accounting agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "Agent foundation", "summary": "Commenters use it as the base layer for AI agents, including in production accounting work.", "quotes": [{"id": 795171488, "item_id": 49698218, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49698218", "by": "Syntaf", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Absolutely love temporal", "excerpt": "Absolutely love temporal, but pretty shocked to see they have a $12.55B valuation.... feels nuts? We're using temporal as the foundation for agents running on our platform doing accounting work for clients, it's proven extremely effective and I love how durable workflows are within temporal. +100 on the technology, but realizing they are also VC funded makes me a little more cautious when it comes to vendor lock in.", "context": "runs agents on platform doing accounting work", "use_case": "durable workflows for accounting agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation"}, {"id": 782235553, "item_id": 48889722, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48889722", "by": "lukebuehler", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "the best substrate for these kind of agents are durable workflow engines. I'm currently supporting Temporal.", "excerpt": "A self-hostable Claude Tag or OAI Work [0]. A while ago, I realized that most new agent harnesses being built must be hosted on your machine or on a VM--in other words the agent needs a full OS process at all times. But we do not have good harnesses being built that are multi-tenant, do not use compute while they are paused, but are are still as powerful as, say, Claude Code or Codex, OpenClaw. So I set out to build ", "context": "", "use_case": "durable workflow engine for agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"}, {"id": 756904769, "item_id": 47306548, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47306548", "by": "stereobit", "date": "2026-03-09", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "A lightweight framework on top of Temporal", "excerpt": "A lightweight framework on top of Temporal for building reliable, stateful AI agents on top of temporal. Think OpenClaw, but durable, with long-term state, and enterprise-ready. We've been using it internally to build agents for a while now and have decided to open-source it. https://github.com/bead-ai/zeitlich", "context": "", "use_case": "workflow engine base", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"}]}, {"label": "Durable reliability", "summary": "Durable workflows add reliability and are described as rock solid for production.", "quotes": [{"id": 795171488, "item_id": 49698218, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49698218", "by": "Syntaf", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Absolutely love temporal", "excerpt": "Absolutely love temporal, but pretty shocked to see they have a $12.55B valuation.... feels nuts? We're using temporal as the foundation for agents running on our platform doing accounting work for clients, it's proven extremely effective and I love how durable workflows are within temporal. +100 on the technology, but realizing they are also VC funded makes me a little more cautious when it comes to vendor lock in.", "context": "runs agents on platform doing accounting work", "use_case": "durable workflows for accounting agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation"}, {"id": 747177090, "item_id": 46698568, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46698568", "by": "jaskirat05", "date": "2026-01-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Temporal for workflow orchestration (overkill for hobby use, but rock solid for production)", "excerpt": "Hey HN, I built this to scratch my own itch. I have an RTX 3070 so just 8gb of VRAM I use ComfyUI for image/video generation, but running multi-step pipelines was painful: - No way to chain small step workflows (image \u2192 edit \u2192 video) without manual intervention - If step 3 of 5 failed, start over - No approval gates to review outputs mid-pipeline - Single GPU bottleneck ComfyAutomate fixes this with: **Chain definiti", "context": "", "use_case": "workflow orchestration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: OpenHiggs \u2013 Chain ComfyUI workflows with approvals and load balancing"}, {"id": 773233936, "item_id": 48327121, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48327121", "by": "bitexploder", "date": "2026-05-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I recommend giving it a try.", "excerpt": "I started setting up my workflows using Temporal. It deploys as relatively light weight local app. For an isolated local installation it uses SQLite. It makes the process of dealing with API retries and organizing workflows and tasks really simple. I recommend giving it a try. It is, philosophically, exactly what this article is suggesting, but it adds an incredibly rich and flexible interface for agents to work with", "context": "", "use_case": "agent workflow orchestration", "switched_from": "", "story": "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"}]}, {"label": "Retry handling", "summary": "It takes over queues, retries and compensating actions so developers write only business logic.", "quotes": [{"id": 795160336, "item_id": 49697521, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49697521", "by": "adamgordonbell", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Temporal's idea is to factor that part out, the queues and retries, and offsetting actions", "excerpt": "Say you've got a process that spans a bunch of services and touches the real world. Some ecommerce check out for example. You need to reserve some inventory, charge a card, eventually email a customer and steps can go wrong. So you have queues, and retries and ways to back things out, undo changes. To my understanding, Temporal's idea is to factor that part out, the queues and retries, and offsetting actions, so you ", "context": "", "use_case": "workflow orchestration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation"}, {"id": 773233936, "item_id": 48327121, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48327121", "by": "bitexploder", "date": "2026-05-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I recommend giving it a try.", "excerpt": "I started setting up my workflows using Temporal. It deploys as relatively light weight local app. For an isolated local installation it uses SQLite. It makes the process of dealing with API retries and organizing workflows and tasks really simple. I recommend giving it a try. It is, philosophically, exactly what this article is suggesting, but it adds an incredibly rich and flexible interface for agents to work with", "context": "", "use_case": "agent workflow orchestration", "switched_from": "", "story": "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"}, {"id": 795172448, "item_id": 49698278, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49698278", "by": "staticautomatic", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Also having a unified control plane is handy even at a pretty small scale", "excerpt": "I think scale is less important than other considerations. For me the biggest motivator is when the use case prefers doing something exactly-once, the downside risk of failure is high, and robust failure handling is moderately complex. The canonical example I use is healthcare communications; others use payment/fulfillment. Also having a unified control plane is handy even at a pretty small scale if your alternative ", "context": "", "use_case": "exactly-once workflow orchestration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation"}]}, {"label": "Workflow visibility", "summary": "The web UI and unified control plane make it easy to inspect what each workflow run is doing.", "quotes": [{"id": 795172448, "item_id": 49698278, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49698278", "by": "staticautomatic", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Also having a unified control plane is handy even at a pretty small scale", "excerpt": "I think scale is less important than other considerations. For me the biggest motivator is when the use case prefers doing something exactly-once, the downside risk of failure is high, and robust failure handling is moderately complex. The canonical example I use is healthcare communications; others use payment/fulfillment. Also having a unified control plane is handy even at a pretty small scale if your alternative ", "context": "", "use_case": "exactly-once workflow orchestration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation"}, {"id": 773233936, "item_id": 48327121, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48327121", "by": "bitexploder", "date": "2026-05-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I recommend giving it a try.", "excerpt": "I started setting up my workflows using Temporal. It deploys as relatively light weight local app. For an isolated local installation it uses SQLite. It makes the process of dealing with API retries and organizing workflows and tasks really simple. I recommend giving it a try. It is, philosophically, exactly what this article is suggesting, but it adds an incredibly rich and flexible interface for agents to work with", "context": "", "use_case": "agent workflow orchestration", "switched_from": "", "story": "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"}]}, {"label": "Light local setup", "summary": "It can run as a fairly lightweight local app backed by SQLite.", "quotes": [{"id": 773233936, "item_id": 48327121, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48327121", "by": "bitexploder", "date": "2026-05-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I recommend giving it a try.", "excerpt": "I started setting up my workflows using Temporal. It deploys as relatively light weight local app. For an isolated local installation it uses SQLite. It makes the process of dealing with API retries and organizing workflows and tasks really simple. I recommend giving it a try. It is, philosophically, exactly what this article is suggesting, but it adds an incredibly rich and flexible interface for agents to work with", "context": "", "use_case": "agent workflow orchestration", "switched_from": "", "story": "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Long-running updates", "summary": "One user needed many workarounds for workflows that run for months and get updated during execution.", "quotes": [{"id": 768342993, "item_id": 48021437, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48021437", "by": "_alphageek", "date": "2026-05-05", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Temporal is a great tool, covering most of the use cases, but for long-running execution, solution around it is starting to be very painful and too complex.", "excerpt": "Hi HN, TBH, it is my first post here and I am nervous a lot, as I put a lot of effort into this product. I have been building http://orch8.io for past 2 months. The story started when I used Temporal for long-running workflows, month after month/many months/years, and ended up in a situation where I needed to write lots of fixes around Temporal. Temporal is a great tool, covering most of the use cases, but for long-r", "context": "", "use_case": "long-running workflows", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Orch8 \u2013 Durable workflow engine in Rust, one binary, Postgres or SQLite"}]}, {"label": "Hobby overkill", "summary": "Described as overkill for hobby projects.", "quotes": [{"id": 747177090, "item_id": 46698568, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46698568", "by": "jaskirat05", "date": "2026-01-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Temporal for workflow orchestration (overkill for hobby use, but rock solid for production)", "excerpt": "Hey HN, I built this to scratch my own itch. I have an RTX 3070 so just 8gb of VRAM I use ComfyUI for image/video generation, but running multi-step pipelines was painful: - No way to chain small step workflows (image \u2192 edit \u2192 video) without manual intervention - If step 3 of 5 failed, start over - No approval gates to review outputs mid-pipeline - Single GPU bottleneck ComfyAutomate fixes this with: **Chain definiti", "context": "", "use_case": "workflow orchestration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: OpenHiggs \u2013 Chain ComfyUI workflows with approvals and load balancing"}]}, {"label": "Vendor lock-in", "summary": "Its VC funding makes one happy user more cautious about lock-in.", "quotes": [{"id": 795171488, "item_id": 49698218, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49698218", "by": "Syntaf", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Absolutely love temporal", "excerpt": "Absolutely love temporal, but pretty shocked to see they have a $12.55B valuation.... feels nuts? We're using temporal as the foundation for agents running on our platform doing accounting work for clients, it's proven extremely effective and I love how durable workflows are within temporal. +100 on the technology, but realizing they are also VC funded makes me a little more cautious when it comes to vendor lock in.", "context": "runs agents on platform doing accounting work", "use_case": "durable workflows for accounting agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation"}]}, {"label": "Narrow focus", "summary": "A competitor's founder, a former user, says it misses the mark by focusing only on durable workflows.", "quotes": [{"id": 743638785, "item_id": 46477424, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46477424", "by": "abelanger", "date": "2026-01-03", "stance": "warn", "quote": "we felt that Temporal misses the mark (I used Temporal for years before starting Hatchet)", "excerpt": "Oh no, haven't gotten reports about the website being slow, thanks for flagging! Which browser are you using? Regarding Temporal, our goal is to create the best developer experience possible, and we started Hatchet because we felt that Temporal misses the mark (I used Temporal for years before starting Hatchet). The primary difference is that we're not solely focused on durable workflows, we're a general-purpose back", "context": "", "use_case": "durable workflows", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2026)"}]}], "who": [{"by": "Syntaf", "context": "runs agents on platform doing accounting work", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49698218", "date": "2026-09-14"}], "tags": ["for AI agents", "for production workflows", "for payments and fulfillment", "runs locally"], "use_cases": ["durable execution", "workflow orchestration", "durable workflows", "exactly-once workflow orchestration", "durable workflows for accounting agents", "durable workflow engine for agents"], "compared": [{"slug": "restate", "name": "Restate", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "hatchet", "name": "Hatchet", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "dbos", "name": "DBOS", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "claude-code", "name": "Claude Code", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "openclaw", "name": "OpenClaw", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49696335", "title": "Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation", "mentions": 4}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49185430", "title": "Celld: Self-hosted, distributed Durable Objects", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48884984", "title": "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48528779", "title": "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48326802", "title": "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48021431", "title": "Show HN: Orch8 \u2013 Durable workflow engine in Rust, one binary, Postgres or SQLite", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"warn": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {"neutral": 2, "recommend": 1}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {"compare": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-08": {"compare": 1}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 2, "compare": 1}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 795174737, "item_id": 49698421, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49698421", "by": "stsffap", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "compare", "quote": "If you want to learn more about how Temporal differs from Restate, check out https://restate.dev/vs/temporal.", "excerpt": "Disclaimer: I am a co-founder of Restate and might be biased. Restate's spiritual father is Stateful Functions (https://nightlies.apache.org/flink/flink-statefun-docs-master/) a library for event driven applications built on top of Apache Flink. If you want to learn more about why we started building Restate, I recommend this excellent blog post https://restate.dev/blog/why-we-built-restate. I understand that Restate", "context": "", "use_case": "durable execution", "switched_from": "", "story": "Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation"}, {"id": 795172448, "item_id": 49698278, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49698278", "by": "staticautomatic", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Also having a unified control plane is handy even at a pretty small scale", "excerpt": "I think scale is less important than other considerations. For me the biggest motivator is when the use case prefers doing something exactly-once, the downside risk of failure is high, and robust failure handling is moderately complex. The canonical example I use is healthcare communications; others use payment/fulfillment. Also having a unified control plane is handy even at a pretty small scale if your alternative ", "context": "", "use_case": "exactly-once workflow orchestration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation"}, {"id": 795171488, "item_id": 49698218, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49698218", "by": "Syntaf", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Absolutely love temporal", "excerpt": "Absolutely love temporal, but pretty shocked to see they have a $12.55B valuation.... feels nuts? We're using temporal as the foundation for agents running on our platform doing accounting work for clients, it's proven extremely effective and I love how durable workflows are within temporal. +100 on the technology, but realizing they are also VC funded makes me a little more cautious when it comes to vendor lock in.", "context": "runs agents on platform doing accounting work", "use_case": "durable workflows for accounting agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation"}, {"id": 795160336, "item_id": 49697521, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49697521", "by": "adamgordonbell", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Temporal's idea is to factor that part out, the queues and retries, and offsetting actions", "excerpt": "Say you've got a process that spans a bunch of services and touches the real world. Some ecommerce check out for example. You need to reserve some inventory, charge a card, eventually email a customer and steps can go wrong. So you have queues, and retries and ways to back things out, undo changes. To my understanding, Temporal's idea is to factor that part out, the queues and retries, and offsetting actions, so you ", "context": "", "use_case": "workflow orchestration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation"}, {"id": 787117440, "item_id": 49194840, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49194840", "by": "7bit", "date": "2026-08-06", "stance": "compare", "quote": "is this something that compares to Temporal or Restate or Azure Durable Functions?", "excerpt": "Hey, is this something that compares to Temporal or Restate or Azure Durable Functions? If so, what are the differences and when would I use Cells instead of the aforementioned?", "context": "", "use_case": "durable execution", "switched_from": "", "story": "Celld: Self-hosted, distributed Durable Objects"}, {"id": 782235553, "item_id": 48889722, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48889722", "by": "lukebuehler", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "the best substrate for these kind of agents are durable workflow engines. I'm currently supporting Temporal.", "excerpt": "A self-hostable Claude Tag or OAI Work [0]. A while ago, I realized that most new agent harnesses being built must be hosted on your machine or on a VM--in other words the agent needs a full OS process at all times. But we do not have good harnesses being built that are multi-tenant, do not use compute while they are paused, but are are still as powerful as, say, Claude Code or Codex, OpenClaw. So I set out to build ", "context": "", "use_case": "durable workflow engine for agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"}, {"id": 776491713, "item_id": 48530732, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48530732", "by": "lukebuehler", "date": "2026-06-14", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Agent harness for durable workflows, starting with Temporal.", "excerpt": "Agent harness for durable workflows, starting with Temporal. Most agents for durable workflows feel like toy examples. There is no \"Codex\" or \"Claude Code\" for, say, Temporal. So I'm building full-featured agent for these runtimes. Why? Because it makes long-running agents easier to operate and scale. Currently, all frontier harnesses need to run inside a guest OS and need a dedicated process, this is quite challengi", "context": "", "use_case": "durable workflows", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"}, {"id": 773233936, "item_id": 48327121, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48327121", "by": "bitexploder", "date": "2026-05-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I recommend giving it a try.", "excerpt": "I started setting up my workflows using Temporal. It deploys as relatively light weight local app. For an isolated local installation it uses SQLite. It makes the process of dealing with API retries and organizing workflows and tasks really simple. I recommend giving it a try. It is, philosophically, exactly what this article is suggesting, but it adds an incredibly rich and flexible interface for agents to work with", "context": "", "use_case": "agent workflow orchestration", "switched_from": "", "story": "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"}, {"id": 768342993, "item_id": 48021437, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48021437", "by": "_alphageek", "date": "2026-05-05", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Temporal is a great tool, covering most of the use cases, but for long-running execution, solution around it is starting to be very painful and too complex.", "excerpt": "Hi HN, TBH, it is my first post here and I am nervous a lot, as I put a lot of effort into this product. I have been building http://orch8.io for past 2 months. The story started when I used Temporal for long-running workflows, month after month/many months/years, and ended up in a situation where I needed to write lots of fixes around Temporal. Temporal is a great tool, covering most of the use cases, but for long-r", "context": "", "use_case": "long-running workflows", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Orch8 \u2013 Durable workflow engine in Rust, one binary, Postgres or SQLite"}, {"id": 761217986, "item_id": 47576124, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47576124", "by": "jaboostin", "date": "2026-03-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Temporal for all sorts of workflows and crons that it builds on its own", "excerpt": "My friends and I have been running a similar homegrown system on a VM at home: Claude Code in a GNU screen managed by systemd, Cloudflare tunnels, Graphiti memory system, a Discord channel plugged into Claude to drive it, and Temporal for all sorts of workflows and crons that it builds on its own. It arrived at the same incredibly fun behavior as you talk about in the readme, where the agent just builds all sorts of ", "context": "", "use_case": "workflows and crons", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Phantom \u2013 Open-source AI agent on its own VM that rewrites its config"}, {"id": 757398816, "item_id": 47337426, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47337426", "by": "virgil_disgr4ce", "date": "2026-03-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Pretty big fan of Temporal. Been using the polyfill for a while.", "excerpt": "Pretty big fan of Temporal. Been using the polyfill for a while. Very nice to use a modern, extremely well thought-through API!", "context": "", "use_case": "date and time handling in JavaScript", "switched_from": "", "story": "Temporal: The 9-Year Journey to Fix Time in JavaScript"}, {"id": 756904769, "item_id": 47306548, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47306548", "by": "stereobit", "date": "2026-03-09", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "A lightweight framework on top of Temporal", "excerpt": "A lightweight framework on top of Temporal for building reliable, stateful AI agents on top of temporal. Think OpenClaw, but durable, with long-term state, and enterprise-ready. We've been using it internally to build agents for a while now and have decided to open-source it. https://github.com/bead-ai/zeitlich", "context": "", "use_case": "workflow engine base", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"}, {"id": 747177090, "item_id": 46698568, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46698568", "by": "jaskirat05", "date": "2026-01-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Temporal for workflow orchestration (overkill for hobby use, but rock solid for production)", "excerpt": "Hey HN, I built this to scratch my own itch. I have an RTX 3070 so just 8gb of VRAM I use ComfyUI for image/video generation, but running multi-step pipelines was painful: - No way to chain small step workflows (image \u2192 edit \u2192 video) without manual intervention - If step 3 of 5 failed, start over - No approval gates to review outputs mid-pipeline - Single GPU bottleneck ComfyAutomate fixes this with: **Chain definiti", "context": "", "use_case": "workflow orchestration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: OpenHiggs \u2013 Chain ComfyUI workflows with approvals and load balancing"}, {"id": 743638785, "item_id": 46477424, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46477424", "by": "abelanger", "date": "2026-01-03", "stance": "warn", "quote": "we felt that Temporal misses the mark (I used Temporal for years before starting Hatchet)", "excerpt": "Oh no, haven't gotten reports about the website being slow, thanks for flagging! Which browser are you using? Regarding Temporal, our goal is to create the best developer experience possible, and we started Hatchet because we felt that Temporal misses the mark (I used Temporal for years before starting Hatchet). The primary difference is that we're not solely focused on durable workflows, we're a general-purpose back", "context": "", "use_case": "durable workflows", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2026)"}]}