First-hand technical writing on crash recovery, idempotent tool execution, checkpointing, and how Actae draws the durability boundary. No product announcements — just the mechanics and the trade-offs.
A runnable walkthrough on the free self-hosted runtime: guard a side effect with the execution ledger, fork the run at the exact failing step, continue the tail, and prove it. Plus the two falsifiable measurements (fork fidelity and crash consistency) a skeptical reviewer should ask for.
Read the noteEvery durable-execution option now resumes an agent after a crash. They differ in what the durability and the fork are anchored to. A fair, dated comparison of Temporal, Inngest, Restate, DBOS, LangGraph checkpointers, and Actae — including when not to choose Actae.
Read the noteA failed agent run shouldn't be a terminal artifact. Fork any execution from an exact boundary, change one decision, and continue with the real inherited state — without replaying the expensive prefix or re-firing production side effects.
Read the noteThree conditions decide whether an agent needs durable execution or whether a queue and a status column is the simpler, correct answer. An honest test from people who build durable execution.
Read the noteWe killed real worker processes in the middle of an external effect and counted the duplicate side effects. A durable ledger alone does not close the window — the stable operation key does.
Read the noteReplay is the easy 80% of durable agent execution. The part that bites is the side-effect boundary, and the question a log can't answer on its own: did step 7 actually finish, or did I just not hear back?
Read the noteTemporal, framework checkpointers, Postgres plus queues, and Actae all make execution durable. They draw the ownership boundary in different places, and that difference decides which one fits your stack.
Read the noteA checkpoint limits how much work you redo. Durable execution decides whether redoing it is safe at all. For agents, the difference is the whole ballgame.
Read the noteLogs, checkpoints, and durable execution persist different things. The one that prevents duplicate side effects is operation identity — not the conversation transcript.
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