Agent skill · product strategy · wshobson
workflow-orchestration-patterns
Design durable workflows with Temporal for distributed systems. Covers workflow vs activity separation, saga patterns, state management, and determinism constraints. Use when building long-running processes, distributed transactions, or microservice orchestration.
Why this skill is useful
Provides domain-specific knowledge on Temporal workflow patterns and best practices that the AI wouldn't reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
About 2k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-05. 38,570 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Workflow Orchestration Patterns Master workflow orchestration architecture with Temporal, covering fundamental design decisions, resilience patterns, and best practices for building reliable distributed systems. When to Use Workflow Orchestration Ideal Use Cases (Source: docs.temporal.io) Multi-step processes spanning machines/services/databases Distributed transactions requiring all-or-nothing semantics Long-running workflows (hours to years) with automatic state persistence Failure recovery that must resume from last successful step Business processes: bookings, orders, campaigns, approvals Entity lifecycle management: inventory tracking, account management, cart workflows Infrastructure automation: CI/CD pipelines, provisioning, deployments Human-in-the-loop systems requiring timeouts and escalations When NOT to Use Simple CRUD operations (use direct API calls) Pure data processing pipelines (use Airflow, batch processing) Stateless request/response (use standard APIs) Real-time streaming (use Kafka, event processors) Detailed patterns and worked examples Detailed pattern documentation lives in references/details.md. Read that file when the navigation tier above is insufficient. Best Practices Workflow Design 1. Keep workflows focused - Single responsibility per workflow 2. Small workflows - Use child workflows for scalability 3. Clear boundaries - Workflow orchestrates, activities execute 4. Test locally - Use time-skipping test environment Activity Design 1. Idempotent operations - Safe to retry 2. Short-lived - Seconds to minutes, not hours 3. Timeout configuration - Always set timeouts 4. Heartbeat for long tasks - Report progress 5. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills wshobson/workflow-orchestration-patterns