3 posts tagged with "architecture"

In modern distributed systems, the boundary between "doing the work" and "managing the work" is where most engineering teams trip up. To understand this, let's return to the restaurant analogy.

• Celery is a Line Cook. It is incredibly fast and efficient at doing exactly one atomic job ("Fry this burger", "Summarize this transcript").
• Temporal or Hatchet is the Restaurant Manager (Orchestrator). It holds the master blueprint of the customer's entire journey, tells the line cooks what to do, goes to sleep when waiting for the customer, and wakes up exactly when needed.

If you find yourself hacking Celery to act as a manager—using complex wait_for_agent logic or passing sticky notes between tasks—you are fighting the framework.

Celery is a phenomenal Task Queue (executing atomic background jobs), but it is a poor Workflow Orchestrator (managing state, pauses, external signals, and retries across disparate services).

Performance in agentic systems is co-defined by the model and the framework around it. Without structure, even a senior-level model behaves like an inconsistent junior engineer.