You Don't Need Temporal Yet: Durable Execution for AI Agents in 150 Lines
At 2:47 AM on a Sunday in June, the weekly re-score run for the B2B outreach agent I've been building died at lead 1,244 of 2,030. An enrichment API returned one 429 too many, a retry threw outside its try block, and Node took the whole process down with it.
The crash wasn't the expensive part. The run had no durable execution, no checkpoint, nothing, so the restart started over from lead 1. It re-billed about $19 of LLM calls that had already finished, and it pushed 96 outreach drafts into a queue that had already accepted them once. Our dedupe caught 90. Six prospects got the same email twice.
Every vendor selling durable execution wants you to believe the fix is their platform. It isn't, at least not on day one. I fixed my pipeline with an event log, a step wrapper, and SQLite, about 150 lines total. Here's...
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