Absurd In Production

Armin Ronacher shares five months of production experience running Absurd, a durable execution system built entirely on Postgres. The core design held up well: tasks, steps, checkpoints, and events remain unchanged. Key additions include decomposed steps (beginStep/completeStep), task result inspection for parent-child workflows, a CLI tool (absurdctl) for debugging, a Go-based web dashboard (Habitat), and agent integration. The checkpoint-based replay model proved superior to deterministic replay systems, and pull-based scheduling simplified operations. Remaining gaps include no built-in scheduler, no push/webhook model, and lack of table partitioning support (with pg_cron limitations making partition lifecycle management tricky). The TypeScript SDK is ~1,400 lines vs Temporal's Python SDK at ~170,000, illustrating the value of keeping complexity in SQL.