Temporal

In this section we explain Temporal, show practical use cases, and walk through Bluetext configuration

1. Temporal

Temporal is an open-source workflow orchestration tool which can be used to build long-running, fault-tolerant apps. Developers write workflow steps in normal programming languages, and Temporal guarantees that these steps will eventually complete, even if servers crash, deploy, fail, or lose connectivity. Temporal records workflow execution history as events and can replay code to exactly restore state.

Temporal workflows describe when things happen and in what order. Workflows are generally composed of one or more activities, which are the functions that perform the actual side effects such as calling external services, writing to databases, or sending emails.

In the context of an online clothing store, the ordering workflow is the process that coordinates the steps of ordering clothes, while the activities are the individual steps that make up the workflow, for example charging the payment, and sending the confirmation email.

The example below shows an example workflow for a clothes ordering workflow in the Temporal UI, from placing the order, to paying and entering your email for confirmation.

2. Temporal in Bluetext

Bluetext integrates Temporal through a three-phase tool discovery system. First, add-temporal scaffolds and starts the Temporal server, Postgres backend (which stores Temporal data), and UI as Polytope-managed containers. Second, add-temporal-client adds the temporal-client library, creates configuration and initialization hooks, and registers the add-temporal-workflow tool in polytope.yml, making it discoverable to AI agents. Third, when agents call the workflow tool, it automatically scaffolds complete workflow files with Pydantic models and activities, then registers them for immediate execution. This progressive enhancement enables AI agents to autonomously build Temporal functionality by first establishing server infrastructure, then client connectivity, and finally discovering workflow creation capabilities.