Durable Workflow
See here for a detailed answer from ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking.
Durable workflow let developers express long-running, complex workflows reliably. The key differentiator is that the workflow runtime persists execution progress/state (often as checkpoints or event history) to durable storage, so the workflow can resume safely after failures, crashes, or restarts.
Why Durable Workflow?
Section titled “Why Durable Workflow?”Durable workflow is helpful for processes that require longer execution times (minutes instead of milliseconds), and/or involve complex state management. Instead of maintaining complex state bookkeeping in application code, durable workflow encourages developers to express workflows as a series of tasks/activities and capture the deterministic state transitions. As a result, workflows become easier to recover/retry and update over time.
When Not to Use Durable Workflow
Section titled “When Not to Use Durable Workflow”Durable workflow might not be a good fit for the following scenarios:
- Short-lived processes.
- Latency sensitive applications.
- Applications leverage non-deterministic/ side-effect operations heavily.
How Durable Workflow Helps in LLM Agency
Section titled “How Durable Workflow Helps in LLM Agency”LLM agents by nature are long-running processes and require complex state management retries and recovery from failures. Durable workflows provide a strong foundation for agent orchestration by decomposing agent behavior into smaller tasks, persisting execution state/history, and enabling safe resumption, retries, and compensation across failures. This turns agent execution into a fault-tolerant process rather than a best-effort script.