The Human Is an Async API — Melanie Warrick, Temporal

This talk introduces the concept of treating humans as asynchronous APIs within agentic systems, emphasizing the need for durable state management when human interaction is required. It demonstrates how Temporal's workers, workflows, and activities can be used to build human-in-the-loop agents that do not block or lose state during human delays, even across worker restarts. The use of 'wait conditions' and 'signals' is highlighted as a mechanism for managing these asynchronous human interactions, preventing production failures caused by blocking calls. The talk also touches upon the decision-making process for when to involve a human in the loop, balancing the cost of errors against alert fatigue.