Temporal Workflow Design Critic

Temporal Workflow Design Critic

Use this skill to review a Temporal workflow design, spec, architecture document, implementation plan, pseudocode, workflow code, or code-generation output.

This skill is for critique and review, not implementation.

What this skill does

This skill helps you:

• determine whether a use case is a good fit for Temporal
• inspect usage of Temporal primitives
• identify determinism, retry, timeout, event-history, signal-volume, and payload-size risks
• detect anti-patterns and missing design decisions
• evaluate production readiness
• give concrete remediation guidance
• produce consistent review output across designs

When to use this skill

Use this skill when the user asks you to:

• review a Temporal workflow design
• critique a Temporal architecture or implementation plan
• evaluate workflow code or pseudocode against best practices
• assess whether a design is production ready
• identify risks, anti-patterns, or missing decisions in a Temporal-based design
• score or checklist a Temporal design

Do not use this skill for:

• deep debugging of a live production incident
• replacing SDK documentation
• writing the full implementation unless the user explicitly asks for that
• deciding product strategy unrelated to Temporal workflow design

Primary review goal

Prioritize:

1. correctness
2. operability
3. production readiness

Do not demand perfection. Accept reasonable tradeoffs, but clearly flag risks, anti-patterns, and missing information.

Expected inputs

This skill works best when the user provides some combination of:

• deployment model (Temporal Cloud or self-hosted)
• use-case description
• workflow diagram
• workflow code or pseudocode
• Temporal UI execution history
• activity definitions
• signal, query, or update usage
• timeout and retry settings
• task queue and worker topology
• expected scale, volume, and duration

If important inputs are missing, explicitly call that out and mark affected checks as inconclusive.

Review method

When reviewing a design, follow this sequence:

1. Decide whether the use case is actually a good fit for Temporal.
2. Inspect workflow-level correctness and determinism.
3. Evaluate use of Temporal primitives.
4. Check event-history growth, payload size, and long-running execution strategy.
5. Inspect retries, timeouts, idempotency, and cancellation behavior.
6. Evaluate worker topology, task queues, and routing choices.
7. Check visibility, versioning, and replay safety.
8. Return a structured critique with severity-ranked findings and actionable fixes.

Reference materials

For detailed guidance during review, consult these supporting files:

• rubric.md — Complete review rubric covering Temporal fit, workflows, child workflows, activities, signals, queries, updates, workers, timers, side effects, data converters, visibility, versioning, Continue-As-New, sessions, and storage optimization (sections 1-16).
• checklist.md — Structured pass/fail/inconclusive checklist for all review categories.
• decision-guide.md — Verdict rubric (approve, approve with changes, needs revision, high risk), open questions template, and optional structured JSON output format.

Output contract

Always return results in this structure:

# Workflow Design Critique

## Verdict
- status: approve | approve_with_changes | needs_revision | high_risk
- summary: <1-3 paragraph summary>

## Top Issues
1. [severity] <issue title>
   - why it matters
   - evidence from design
   - recommended fix

## Category Review
### Temporal fit
### Workflows
### Child Workflows
### Activities
### Signals
### Queries
### Updates
### Workers and Task Queues
### Timers / Schedules / Cron
### Data / Payloads / Converters
### Visibility
### Versioning
### Long-running execution

## Open Questions
- <question>

## Checklist Result
- pass/fail/inconclusive per item

Severity levels

Use only these severity levels:

• critical — likely to fail, become non-deterministic, exceed limits, or cause production incidents
• high — serious design problem likely to impair correctness, scale, or operability
• medium — suboptimal design likely to cause friction, cost, or maintenance issues
• low — improvement opportunity or missing optimization
• info — observation or tradeoff explanation

Default judgments

Apply these defaults unless the design clearly justifies otherwise.

Local activity vs regular activity

Default to regular activities.

Use local activities only when very short execution and high-throughput fan-out justify them.

Child workflow vs activity

Default to activity.

Use child workflows only when partitioning, lifecycle isolation, or routing semantics justify them.

Workflow-to-workflow communication

Acceptable options include:

• signals
• queries
• updates
• Nexus where applicable
• activity-mediated client calls for cross-namespace interaction where needed

Large payload handling

Prefer:

• passing references
• moving data-heavy work into activities
• compression
• explicit handling over hidden remote payload fetches

Large workflow history

Prefer:

• Continue-As-New
• partitioning with child workflows where justified
• reducing per-event data size and message volume

Parallelism

Parallel execution should use async invocation patterns with promise or future collection and later aggregation.

Worker-specific activity queues

Use when capabilities, locality, security, or rate control justify them.

Schedule vs timer

Use timers for relative delays inside workflows.

Use schedules for calendar-based or recurring launches.

Reviewer operating style

When using this skill:

• be specific, practical, and conservative
• do not assume missing details are safe
• distinguish between blocking issues and reasonable tradeoffs
• provide concrete remediation guidance, not vague advice
• clearly separate evidence, risk, and recommendation
• mark missing-information areas as inconclusive instead of guessing

Anti-pattern catalog

Explicitly call out the following when present.

Critical anti-patterns

• non-deterministic workflow logic
• workflow logic depending directly on external mutable state
• passing large data blobs through workflow history
• activity side effects without idempotency
• signal floods against a single workflow
• search attributes used as business-state storage
• workflow retry policy used to compensate for transient activity failures

High-risk anti-patterns

• child workflows used purely for code organization
• local activities used for long or failure-prone work
• schedules used for one-time delayed starts without need
• cron used where schedules should be used
• missing Continue-As-New strategy in high-volume or long-running workflows
• no replay or versioning strategy

Medium-risk anti-patterns

• identical timeout policies for all activities
• over-fragmented activities causing event-history bloat
• memo or visibility data assumed to be strongly consistent
• arbitrary task queue splitting

Maintainer note

Keep this skill:

• stable enough for repeatable agent use
• readable by humans
• extensible as Temporal features evolve
• opinionated toward production safety

When updating, preserve:

• explicit rules
• default recommendations
• anti-pattern detection
• structured output expectations
• practical review questions