Everyone's wiring AI agents into pipelines. Almost nobody tells you the orchestration layer is where it makes or breaks. I built a self-driving SDLC that specs, codes, tests, reviews and ships. To get there I battle-tested durable execution: Temporal, Restate, Inngest, LangGraph, DAG schedulers and more. I came back with scars to save you the trip.

No orchestrator is a free lunch - each is great at one thing and painful at another - and I'll map the tradeoffs. Then the part that bites whichever you pick: durable execution wants a world that never changes; an LLM invents a new answer every time. Keep them apart - a thin controller that picks the next step, the real work (model calls, file writes) outside it - or a crash re-runs your expensive model calls and pays twice.

You'll walk away knowing which engine to grab and which to skip, the failures that find you no matter the tool, why your agents will lie about success - and an honest answer to whether it's all worth the price.