Events are the Wrong Abstraction for Your AI Agents - Mason Egger, Temporal.io

Core Argument - The presentation argues that event-driven architecture (EDA), while seemingly loosely coupled at runtime, is tightly coupled at design time, leading to complexities and challenges in AI agent development [21][22] - It proposes a shift in focus from events to durable execution as the core of AI agent architecture, which simplifies development and handles failures more effectively [26][27] Problems with Event-Driven Architecture - EDA sacrifices clear APIs, as events lack the documentation and structure of traditional APIs [15] - Business logic becomes fragmented and scattered across multiple services, making debugging and understanding the system more difficult [16] - Services become ad hoc state machines, leading to potential race conditions and difficult-to-debug issues [18][19] - EDA can lead to reluctance to iterate on architecture due to fear of breaking existing functionality [25] Durable Execution as a Solution - Durable execution is presented as a crash-proof execution environment that automatically preserves application state, virtualizes execution, and is not limited by time or hardware [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34] - It allows developers to focus on business logic rather than managing events and queues [38] - Temporal provides durable execution as an open-source, MIT-licensed product with SDKs for multiple programming languages [38][39] - Durable execution abstracts away the complexities of events into the software layer [40][43] Temporal's Offering - Temporal's durable execution system offers automatic retries for failures, such as LLM downtime or rate limits [36] - It supports polyglot programming, allowing functions written in different languages to be called seamlessly [39] - Temporal is available for demonstration and further discussion at the company's booth and Slack channel [44][45]