Overview
What a workflow is, the SDK as a thin wrapper over Temporal, workflow vs agent
Workflow Overview
Audience: Customer developers building automation on the Agentic Hub, and admins who govern it. You write your workflows in your own repository; the platform runs and governs them.
A workflow is durable, long-running automation: a sequence of steps that can call agents and
tools, pause for a human decision, wait days for an email reply, retry on failure, and survive a
process crash without losing its place. You write workflows in Python with the Workflow SDK
(workflow_sdk) in your customer repository, and the platform runs each one on an isolated,
governed worker.
Workflow vs. agent
Use the right tool for the job:
| Agent | Workflow | |
|---|---|---|
| Shape | Conversational / single-turn reasoning | Multi-step, long-running process |
| Duration | Seconds | Seconds to weeks (waits for humans, emails, timers) |
| State | Mostly stateless per turn | Durable, survives crashes and restarts |
| Best for | "Answer this", "summarise that" | "Onboard this vendor", "review and approve this case" |
Workflows and agents compose: a workflow orchestrates the process and calls agents for the reasoning-heavy steps (see Calling agents & tools).
A thin wrapper over Temporal
The Workflow SDK is a thin abstraction over Temporal. Temporal is the durable-execution engine that gives your workflow its superpowers — durable state, automatic retries, timers, and crash recovery. The SDK adds the agentic-hub patterns on top:
- Correction loops — repeat a step with human feedback until it's right.
- Human-in-the-loop (HITL) — pause for a governed human review.
- Email watcher — park the workflow until a matching reply arrives.
- Managed state — typed, immutable, auditable Pydantic entities.
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You can drop down to raw Temporal. The SDK re-exports Temporal's own
workflowandactivity, so you can callworkflow.execute_activity, start child workflows, set timers, and define your own signals directly. But then the agentic-hub patterns above do not come for free — HITL, correction loops, and the email watcher follow agentic-hub implementation details you'd have to reproduce yourself. Start with the SDK patterns; reach for raw Temporal only when you need something they don't cover.
What the platform runs it on
You never operate a runtime. You edit code, commit, and the platform builds your code and rolls it onto a personal, isolated remote worker — one per developer. That inner loop is covered in The dev loop & remote workers.
Governance, from the start
Everything a workflow does that touches the outside world is governed:
- Calling an agent requires an explicit grant (you declare it; an admin approves the policy).
- Human review is a first-class, auditable step — you declare exactly what a reviewer sees.
- State is immutable and append-only, so every decision can be reasoned about and audited.
This section
- Overview — you are here.
- The dev loop & remote workers — how your code becomes a running worker.
- Building a workflow — the registration contract, steps, and correction loops.
- Human-in-the-loop — governed human review, and when to use it.
- State & the entity model — typed, immutable, auditable state.
- Calling agents & tools — invoking agents under policy.