Rails 8.1 shipped Active Job Continuation so long-running jobs survive restarts and resume from a checkpoint. This was a real step forward, but can only be the beginning. The workflows Rails apps orchestrate today need more than interruptibility: durable state across steps, pause/resume capabilities, and human-in-the-loop-like interactions. Building complex workflows and agentic pipelines in Rails has been simplified but still requires manual plumbing or reaching out to third-party gems or services.
This talk explores the preexisting patterns and solutions to the durable workflow orchestration problem and introduces a small, principled extension to Active Job that connects the dot: same step DSL, same job runner, now with persistent context, scheduled steps, and first-class resumeability.
