Approach to executing workflows — sequences of steps that depend on each other's completion or failure — such that state is persisted between steps, retries are safe and idempotent, and steps can wait long periods (days, months) without tying up a worker. A true durable-execution runtime would have to serialize call stacks, DB connections, sockets, API clients and transient state. Vendors (Temporal, Restate, Cloudflare Workflows, Durable Objects) approximate this with imperative JS/TS and opaque runtime tricks; Julik argues the honest approach is to separate the DAG definition from the imperative node code.