AgentLoop
Run until done
An agent that calls tools, observes results, and decides when to stop — bounded by an explicit turn limit, recoverable across restarts.
Case study · Open source
DagNats
A DAG workflow engine for durable jobs and autonomous LLM coding pipelines. One Go binary, an embedded NATS server, and step types — AgentLoop, Planner, Approval, Continue-As-New — that other engines treat as application-layer concerns.
NATS JetStream embedded · Event-sourced state · One process · scp + run
Project
Durable workflow engine
Engagement
Original engine design and build
Status
v0.1 · alpha · open source
Overview
DAGs that survive restarts.
Describe work as a directed acyclic graph of tasks. The engine runs the graph, retries failures, recovers from crashes, and reconstructs state from an immutable event log.
The deploy is scp dagnats user@host && ./dagnats serve. No Postgres to migrate, no Redis to monitor, no broker to configure. The embedded NATS server is the entire substrate.
Step types
Agent loops are first-class.
Most engines treat “run an agent until it’s done” as application-layer code you write per project. DagNats ships those primitives in the workflow language.
Planner
Decompose then dispatch
Generate a sub-DAG of work from a brief, then run the sub-DAG through the same engine — recursion as data, not call stack.
Approval
Pause for a human
Halt the run, surface a question to a human, and resume the workflow when an external signal arrives.
Continue-As-New
Bounded recursion
Carry state into a fresh run instead of unbounded loops — explicit, audit-friendly, terminating.
Architecture
JetStream is the entire system.
All workflow state lives in NATS JetStream — durable streams for events, KV buckets for snapshots and run metadata. There is no separate database.
Compared to neighbors
Lighter than Temporal. Self-hostable in one binary.
Temporal, Hatchet, and Inngest each have their place. DagNats is the niche where native agent step types, a one-binary deploy, and zero external databases all matter.
Specifications
One process. One wire format.
Language
Go (no CGo)
Module
github.com/danmestas/dagnats
Transport
NATS JetStream (embedded)
State
Event-sourced + KV snapshots
Binaries
1 — dagnats serve
SDKs
Go · HTTP bridge
Discipline
TigerStyle · bounded loops
License
Apache-2.0 · alpha
Related
The orchestration layer.
DagNats orchestrates work that libfossil stores and EdgeSync distributes — three pieces of one substrate for autonomous coding agents.
Reach out
Questions about the engine, want to use it for something, or just want to compare notes — send me an email.
[email protected]