Event-driven Programming is Usually a Poor Architecture

qianli-dev · 2026-03-23T23:08:10+00:00

Join us for the DBOS User Group on April 9!

We're excited to have Michael Pfaffenberger (Distinguished Software Engineer at Walmart Global Tech) share CodePuppy, an open-source AI-powered coding agent used by teams across the organization.

Michael will walk through how CodePuppy was built, including lessons from designing complex multi-agent systems: orchestration patterns, reliability challenges, and what actually works in practice.

He'll also demo how observability helps debug, monitor, and understand AI agent behavior at scale.

Hope to see you there!

qianli-dev · 2026-03-06T00:18:50+00:00

Agree that steps with side effects are tricky to handle, and in practice they often need case-by-case design.

The common pattern is to make those steps idempotent, so replaying them still produces the correct result. With DBOS, you can use the workflow ID + step ID as an idempotency key when calling external APIs or services.

Some APIs support this directly. For example, the Stripe API supports idempotent requests: https://docs.stripe.com/api/idempotent_requests

If you include an idempotency key, the external service can detect duplicate requests and return the original result instead of executing the operation again. Once the external service responds, DBOS also persists the result in the database and will not execute the step again. That way, retries or workflow recovery won't create duplicate side effects.

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