Workflows and Agents

Why it sits here

Second because a harness without durability is a demo. The moment your process crosses two systems, waits on a human, or touches money, the loop from module 01 needs a substrate that survives process death — and the constraints that substrate imposes reach back and reshape the loop.

Lessons

1. 01One word, two unrelated meaningsThe largest single source of confusion in this space, and it is pure vocabulary.6m
2. 02Three implementation familiesVendors blur this. The difference determines your failure modes, so establish it first about any engine.9m
3. 03Batch orchestration is not durable executionConstantly conflated. The tell is the time axis.6m
4. 04Deterministic engine, non-deterministic modelThe usual framing is wrong, and the correct composition is now a shipped contract rather than an argument.10m
5. 05Human-in-the-loop as a workflow primitiveThe part most teams get structurally wrong. Two of the four steps are ordered for correctness.10m
6. 06The primitives you cannot avoidExactly-once delivery is impossible. Exactly-once effects are achievable. Everything here is machinery for the gap.8m

Ranked, not exhaustive. The lessons stand on their own, so treat the first tier as the genuinely load-bearing sources and the rest as depth when a lesson makes you want it.