Building an agentic system that’s actually production-ready

What this post added

This post provides a practical guide to building production-ready agentic AI systems, building upon the concept that agentic systems are distributed systems in disguise. It defines key terms like AI, Goal, Tool, User, Agent, and Agentic System, and introduces advanced concepts like Multi-Agent systems and Agents as Tools. The post illustrates the agentic flow (Interaction, Decision, Action) orchestrated by Temporal Workflows, and details the challenges in building these systems for production, such as unreliability of components, non-determinism of AI, complexity, and security. It strongly advocates for Temporal's Durable Execution as the solution for building stateful, fault-tolerant, and observable agentic systems, and provides a simplified code example of an agentic workflow framework using Temporal Signals, Activities, and workflow logic for planning and executing tools, including user interaction for confirmation and input gathering.