The distributed systems world solved long-running transactions with SAGA. The agentic AI world has a harder version of the same problem. Here's how Agent Harness answers it.
Introduction
I've been deep in agentic AI architecture for a while now & building Digital Workers, designing multi-agent systems, working through the messy production realities of agents that call tools, consult knowledge bases, and loop back on themselves when they're uncertain. And one question keeps coming up when I talk to engineers who come from a microservices background: "Can't we just use SAGA for this?"
It's a fair question. SAGA is one of the more elegant patterns in distributed systems. And on the surface, agentic workflows look similar enough that the analogy is tempting. Both involve coordinating multi-step processes. Both need state management and failure recovery. Both have to deal with partial completions.
But the moment you dig into the details, you realize why SAGA alone isn't enough and why Agent Harness exists.
