Human-in-the-loop as a workflow primitive
The part most teams get structurally wrong. Two of the four steps are ordered for correctness.
Lesson 05 of 06 · 10 min
A durable wait is four things, and the ordering of two of them is a correctness requirement rather than a style preference.
- Mint a handle identifying this specific pause in this specific execution.
- Persist the pause so it survives the process.
- Notify the human, carrying the handle, as a step so it is retried if it fails and not repeated if it succeeded.
- Race the wait against a durable timer so "no response" is a modelled outcome rather than a hang.
Why must minting the handle come before notifying the human?
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