Files is all you need.

https://xkcd.com/378/

> The caveat is that Litestream replication is asynchronous. A restore can miss the newest local writes if the SQLite volume disappears before they are copied. That is fine for many AI and experimentation workflows

In short: SQLite is not all you need, unless you’re just experimenting don’t actually care about durability, in which case you also need litestream + object storage.

Right.

Haha, I just started doing this on my own. Found it helps the agents preserve state better. I typically ask them to design a DAG first based on a set of specifications and then execute it (each step stores something in a SQLite DB). Iteration is pretty simple then because I just ask for a tweak to one or two steps of the DAG, and then to re-run.

Funny how people are independently converging on similar patterns of "what works" here. Still feels like we're in the wild west with all these ad-hoc patterns of agent orchestration that people are coming up with.

It's close enough that DBOS does support SQLite. [0] The default for prototyping is SQLite, but sure you can run it in production if you wanted.

Obligatory list of workflow engines and libraries because it's such a common need that a lot have rolled their own. [1]

[0] https://docs.dbos.dev/python/tutorials/database-connection

[1] https://github.com/meirwah/awesome-workflow-engines

I started setting up my workflows using Temporal. It deploys as relatively light weight local app. For an isolated local installation it uses SQLite. It makes the process of dealing with API retries and organizing workflows and tasks really simple. I recommend giving it a try. It is, philosophically, exactly what this article is suggesting, but it adds an incredibly rich and flexible interface for agents to work with. Additionally, the web UI makes it very easy to inspect workflows, review agent execution, etc. Temporal also encodes much higher reliability into your system, almost for free. Distributed and reliable systems are hard, don't reinvent the wheel IMO.

If you find yourself wanting things like an easy way to then introspect your SQLite database, figure out what is happening in the workflow, compose individual tasks, make workflows trivially callable, etc, give Temporal a look.

Alongside this, I have mostly moved away from files for agents. Markdown and JSON are great, but also feel like traps when building out smaller local apps. LLMs are great at SQLite and you can render anything you want out of it (Markdown, JSON, etc). It saves a lot of tokens when an agent can just query a specific row instead of having to fire up jq or grep through markdown. You get a nice portable self contained data management system that encourages agents to be more disciplined about how they structure their data than a bunch of files. It also continues to scale into MySQL/Postgres if your little local projects start to outgrow or become more formal, you already have schema and discipline around data.

Meta comment: This is a domain under my countries TLD (Slovakia) and it is one of the handful of words that are a word with the TLD in my language (and coincidentally) also in English. Every now and then, I will check on the domains with a retrograde dictionary for domains that have this property and root of this particular domain had a roundcube email server on it (can be checked on archive.org). After further checking, the local company actually named themselves Obeli s.r.o. (s.r.o. is Ltd), presumably so that they could use a domain that is a real word when said together with the TLD.

Another fascinating fact: our countries TLD has been stolen Ocean's 11 style (I am not kidding). After Czechoslovakia split into Czech Republic and Slovak Republic, the newly created Slovak .sk TLD has been under the care of people from the local university. The university also had some offices that they were leasing out. Someone had leased this office space, created a company that had the same name as the NGO that was taking care of the domain, so e.g. the NGO was named "My Company a.s." and the perpetrator created a "My Company s.r.o." (our countries version of the american Ltd). This person then wrote to ICANN to change the address to the "My Company s.r.o." presumably under the pretense that this was just an administrative error and from this point, they have functionally taken custody of the TLD. I was not able to find how they did it technically, but I presume they persuaded ICANN to then point to their servers instead of the real ones. After this happened, it seems that no one noticed for some time. When they noticed, they tried taking it back, but they weren't able to. For some inexplicable reason, the government during that time (Šuster era, early 2000s) gave the new company a contract that was functionally uncancellable from the government side. Later governments made this even more uncancellable and in 2017, then Minister of IT (and as of this day president!) Pellegrini made the contract literally uncancellable. As a result of this, we have one of the most expensive domains around (18e/year, rising each year for no good reason).

I might have gotten some details wrong as I am writing this from my memory of researching it a couple of years back, but you get the idea, crazy stuff. Here is an article in Czech [0] that tells the story a bit better, but you have to translate it.

[0] https://www.root.cz/clanky/pribeh-domeny-sk-aneb-kradez-za-b...