# Temporal CTO: A 20-year shortcut to build reliable agents

DevFeed: [Temporal CTO: A 20-year shortcut to build reliable agents](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/temporal-cto-a-20-year-shortcut-to-build-reliable-agents-1907.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://1password.com/blog/build-reliable-agents>)

Author: info@1password.com (Chris Fowler)

Published: 2026-08-04T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Blog on 1Password Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/blog-on-1password-blog.md>)

Topics: [distributed-systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/distributed-systems.md>), [Artificial Intelligence](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai.md>), [Large Language Model](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/llm.md>), [Processes](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/processes.md>), [Orchestration](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/orchestration.md>)

Tags: [agentic](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/agentic.md>), [agents](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/agents.md>), [ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai.md>), [architecture](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/architecture.md>), [ddos](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ddos.md>), [developers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/developers.md>), [distributed-systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/distributed-systems.md>), [infrastructure](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/infrastructure.md>), [llm](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/llm.md>), [podcasts](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/podcasts.md>)

## AI overview

The article explains why long-running agentic systems encounter familiar distributed-systems failures, especially state loss and retry storms. It presents durable execution, flow control, queues, and rate limiting as mechanisms for making agents recoverable and resilient in production.

## Source excerpt

Zero-Shot Learning is a podcast about how AI gets built, secured, and deployed. Hosted by Nancy Wang, 1Password CTO, and Dev Tagare, Senior Director of Engineering at Google, it's a builder's view of the architecture and the complex decisions it takes to ship with AI. In this episode, 1Password VP, GM of Developer and AI, Jeff Malnick sits in for Dev. When Maxim Fateev, CTO and co-founder of Temporal, joined Zero-Shot Learning, he brought a historical perspective to the challenges developers face when building agentic systems today. From vanishing state to retry storms, Fateev saw that the failures of deploying long-running agents have parallels to the problems he's been working on for decades. Maxim joined Amazon in 2002, where he co-created Simple Workflow Service, the internal orchestration platform that became one of the most widely used services at Amazon. At Uber, he built Cadence, the open-source predecessor to Temporal, the durable execution platform, which he co-founded in 2019. Temporal now runs production workloads for OpenAI, GitLab, Lovable, Docker, and Cloudflare, and has more than 2,500 customers globally. As the industry builds agentic systems, Fateev is watching it rediscover exactly what his infrastructure was built to solve. A brief history of failures Agents become distributed systems the moment they cross a network. Every call to an LLM, every tool invocation, every write to a downstream service crosses a process boundary, and a process boundary is where distributed systems failures begin. Two common ways agents fail in production are state loss and retry storms. While working, an agent builds state, e.g. a record of which tools it called, the results it received, and how far it progressed in a task. When the process crashes, that record is gone. There is no checkpoint to resume from, no record of what was completed, no way to distinguish completed work from incomplete work. The next run starts from scratch, leaving the operator unsure which act