Show HN: Hatchet v1 – A task orchestration platform built on Postgres

Here is my feedback after spending 15 mins on your docs.

Nice work on the lite mode, open source, logging, dx interface.

You may want to replace Hello world examples with real world scenarios.

The workflows that involve multiple steps tasks, dag in your terminology - the code simply isn't intuitive.

You now have to get into the hatchets mindset, patterns, terminology. Eg: the random number example is riddled with too many. How many of the logos on your homepage did you have to write code for? Be honest.

Knowing to program should be 90% enough. Eg for js:

   // send("hi", user => user.signed_up_today)
   //  .waitFor("7d")
   //  .send("upgrade", user => !user.upgraded)

Just made this up, but something like this is more readable. (PS:would love to be proved wrong by an implementation of exactly the above example here in the comments). The whole point of being smart is for your team at hatchet to absorb difficulty at the benefit of an easy interface that looks simple and magic. Your 5 line examples has types to learn, functions to learn, arguments to know, 5-10 kinds of things to learn. It showed little effort to make it easy for customers.

An engineering post on what's under the hood makes sense. But customers really don't care about your cloud infra flexes in a post introducing your company pitching the product. It's just koolaid.

Same with complete rewrite so early. I'm glad you are open to change. But the workflow market today with so many options, i don't belive this is the last rewrite or pivot to come.

The DAGs itself aren't very readable. You are better off switching to something like react flow that lets you nocode edit as well.

Focus on automation journeys that are common. Like cookbooks. And allow folks to just import them or change some configurations. like drip marketing, renewals, expired cards, forgot password handlers, shortlink creators, maybe pdf merging, turning a bunch of saved links to a daily blog post, etc

How does a workflow replace a saas they are paying $99 for. That's powerful.

Tough to serialize a worflow to json . Or atleast didn't see it. this makes it easy to have workflows as code, create nocode editors in your own roadmap. You want people to hop from 1 company to another taking their hatchet workflows with them

Good luck, and sorry for coming off as rude. It's just a space I am very passionate about.

I'm saying there are too many things to learn to get even a simple example let alone a real world example going. Have a look at their examples at https://docs.hatchet.run/home/conditional-workflows

Ah, so that issue is specifically related to a statistics/count query used by the UI and not by River itself. I think it's something we'll build a more efficient solution for in the future because counting large quantities of records in Postgres tends to be slow no matter what, but hopefully it won't get in the way of regular usage.

> Perceived only at this stage, though the kind of volume we’re looking at is 10s to 100s of millions of jobs per day.

Yeah that's a little over 100 jobs/sec sustained :) Shouldn't be much of an issue on appropriate hardware and with a little tuning, in particular to keep your jobs table from growing to more than a few million rows and to vacuum frequently. Definitely hit us up if you try it and start having any trouble!

This looks super promising, really like the deep PostgreSQL integration and the effort toward durable execution.

One aspect I’d be curious to hear more about (and might be worth expanding on in docs or future posts) is how hatchet holds up operationally in production. For example, what does a typical alerting setup look like for common failure modes? And since the system relies on partitioned tables and tuned schemas, how do you approach migrations or schema changes without downtime?

A lot of open-source job orchestration systems shine at the core execution model but fall short when it comes to observability and smooth day-2 operations. If Hatchet nails that too, it’s a huge win.