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Temporal is the reference point for durable execution, earning that answer for payment processing, order fulfillment, and high-throughput distributed transaction systems; this page won’t argue otherwise. Smithers applies the same guarantee, “a crash never loses finished work,” to a different unit of work: an AI agent editing a real repository over many steps, with humans in the loop. That difference drives every design choice below.

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The short version

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The two designs, honestly

Temporal replays; Smithers re-renders. Temporal reconstructs workflow state by re-executing your code against an event history: that’s why the determinism rules exist (no IO, no randomness, no time, side effects quarantined in activities), a powerful, high-throughput model. Smithers persists each task’s validated output to SQLite and re-renders the workflow tree against that state, so your code carries no determinism contract: an agent task can shell out, edit files, and call flaky tools, because the unit of recovery is the step, not the instruction. The infrastructure floor is different by orders of magnitude. That’s the cost of Temporal’s scale profile, not a knock on it: most teams orchestrating coding agents are one developer with a laptop and a CI runner, and shouldn’t need a platform team for durable runs. Agent work needs things business transactions do not. Reviewing an agent’s work: see the diff, rewind before a bad decision, fork an alternate attempt. Smithers snapshots the filesystem alongside the database: rewind and fork restore the working tree, not just workflow state. Approvals, review loops, evals, and prompt optimization ship in the box: agent output quality is part of orchestration, not bolted on top.

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When to pick which

Pick Temporal for high-volume distributed transactions, a team that already runs (or wants) a workflow platform, or polyglot SDKs across services. Pick Smithers for agents doing real work in real repositories, durability without operating anything, and humans gating what ships. Plenty of teams run both: they don’t compete for the same jobs.

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See also