The bot that lied to cricket fans with a straight face: Temporal x San Francisco Unicorns

What this post added

This post details the development of a WhatsApp bot for San Francisco Unicorns fans, showcasing the use of Temporal Workflows for managing asynchronous tasks like match reminders and live-score polling. It highlights the `conversationTurnWorkflow`, `matchReminderWorkflow`, `matchScoreSubscriptionWorkflow`, and `postMatchSummaryWorkflow` for handling user messages, scheduling reminders, polling scores with Continue-as-New for history management, and sending post-match summaries. The post also discusses challenges with WhatsApp's 24-hour messaging window, webhook verification, and duplicate message handling. A critical failure scenario where the bot provided stale scores due to an incorrect budget limit implementation is described, emphasizing Temporal's role in ensuring workflow continuity and recovery.