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Pick Temporal when your agent work must survive anything for days, at scale, and you can run or rent its service. Pick Obversa when the work is a team of agent tools on one machine, and what you need is the process between them written down: roles, reviews that send work back, a person at the gate, a record. Temporal’s own words: “Temporal is a scalable and reliable runtime for durable function executions called Temporal Workflow Executions.” A workflow calls activities; every step is an event in a history; a new worker replays the history after a crash and continues from the exact point. A person is a signal the workflow waits for. Sending rejected work back to an earlier step is control flow you write in the workflow. Here is the shape Obversa is for, as one file:

Side by side

Where Temporal wins

  • Durable execution is the requirement: multi-day runs, many workers, replay after any failure.
  • You already run Temporal for other work.
  • You need a language other than TypeScript.

Where Obversa wins

  • There is one machine, the agents are tools on it, and a server would be more than the job needs.
  • The review that sends work back and the person at the gate should be declared, not written as control flow each time.
  • The team should be readable as one file with the record beside it.

Where to go

A feature team, as a file for the file above with its recorded run; what is a meta-harness for the layer Obversa is.