core practice · system design prompt
Design exercise: Durable Agent Execution
Checkpointed loops, resumable tools, idempotency, leases, event histories, retries, and crash recovery. Implement designOutline() returning non-empty values for: checkpoint, idempotency, resumeProtocol. Each value must name a concrete mechanism or decision.
The mechanism
A durable agent records decisions and side-effect identities so it can resume after interruption without repeating irreversible work.
Expected evidence
A design outline with checkpoint, idempotency, resumeProtocol plus an explicit failure mode or trade-off.
Try this drill in the practice workspace →
Hints when you need them
- Name the failure mode before selecting the mechanism.
Check the sources
- Serverless Workflows with Durable Functions and Netherite
- Atomix: Timely, Transactional Tool Use for Reliable Agentic Workflows
- Workflows, a New Abstraction for Distributed Systems — Dominik Tornow (Strange Loop 2022)
- Durable Functions: Semantics for Stateful Serverless (OOPSLA '21)
- Temporal — Understanding Temporal (Durable Execution)