Roadmap

Available today#

The core engine and all primitives are feature-complete and covered by 230+ tests, including SIGKILL crash-injection and multi-node Postgres chaos suites. What remains is launch packaging and a few in-progress features listed below.

• At-least-once delivery with leases, exponential backoff + jitter, and a dead-letter queue
• Per-key concurrency limits, round-robin fairness, debounce, throttle, and token-bucket rate limits
• Batch consumers, priorities, delayed jobs, backpressure admission control
• Persisted cron + intervals: IANA timezones, overlap policies (skip / queue / allow), missed-tick catchup
• Graceful drain on shutdown; SIGINT/SIGTERM handlers built in
• Pause / resume, bulk purge, dead-letter requeue — full queue control plane

• Step memoization model — no Temporal-style determinism rules, no replay constraints
• All step primitives: step.run, step.sleep, step.waitForEvent, step.invoke, step.all
• Per-step timeouts, independent retry budgets, exhaustion with a precise error
• Idempotency keys (race-safe), run cancellation with descendant propagation
• Content-hash version pinning — in-flight runs finish on old logic while new runs use new code
• Realtime run subscription: async-iterable stream of status + step events, pipe to SSE or WebSocket
• Large-payload offloading: step results over a threshold go to a blob store; replay rehydrates transparently

• Atomic event outbox: one transaction persists the event, wakes matching waiters, and creates triggered runs
• Wildcard topic patterns (user.*, billing.**), ephemeral subscribers with unsubscribe
• Durable workflow triggers (on: "event.name") with match predicates
• Persisted state machines: transitions, history, and triggered runs commit atomically

• Express-compatible: app.use() middleware (global / path-scoped / 4-arg error), Router() mounting
• Dual handler signature: Express (req, res, next) or rich ctx — chosen by arity
• Built-in middleware: json(), cors(), logger(), static(), auth(), validate(), secureHeaders(), rateLimit()
• Adapters: toNodeHandler() for Express / Connect / Fastify, toFetchHandler() for Next.js / Hono / Bun / Deno / edge
• Radix-tree router with webhook → workflow sugar
• Dedicated Fastify plugin, Hono middleware, and Nest.js module wrappers (in progress)

• SSE live updates with polling fallback — run timelines, step graphs, queue health
• Dead-letter queue inspection and one-click requeue
• Schedule browser, event feed, engine metrics
• Operator vs read-only RBAC tokens; optional Bearer auth
• Full React SPA refactor with dedicated agent session browser (in progress)

• Agents compile to durable workflows — every LLM call and tool execution is a journaled step
• Tool failures retry without re-calling the LLM; session memory persisted across runs
• Human-in-the-loop: requiresApproval → durable waitForEvent pause with approve / deny API
• Providers: Anthropic, OpenAI-compatible, Google Gemini, AWS Bedrock (SigV4), and a scripted mock
• Multi-agent handoff (handoffTool) and networks (app.network()) with durable routing
• Tiered memory: semantic recall (embeddings + vector store) and working-memory compression
• Built-in evals: rule-based, statistical, and model-graded (llmJudge) — gate deploys on prompt quality
• MCP consume: connect to any MCP server as durable agent tools
• MCP author: expose your workflows and agents as an MCP server for other agents to call
• Per-model cost accounting; circuit breakers + bulkheads on model calls

• Same API as embedded — one config line switches from SQLite to Postgres
• FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED claims; LISTEN/NOTIFY cross-node wakeups; advisory-lock scheduler election
• Lease-based dead-worker recovery — validated with a 3-node kill-a-node chaos test
• Priority-ordered dequeue index and event outbox range partitioning for large-scale deployments
• Clock-skew-safe leases: expiry uses the database server clock, not per-node wall clocks

• Payload encryption at rest: opt-in AES-256-GCM on all payload columns — transparent to enable
• Retention GC: bounded store growth; Postgres event outbox GC drops whole partitions
• Health probes: /healthz (liveness, zero I/O) and /readyz (store-checked readiness)
• Fencing tokens against zombie workers; SSRF allowlists on user-controlled fetches
• Graceful HTTP drain, backpressure admission control, idempotency helpers
• Secrets resolution (env: / file:), deep secret redaction, boot-time config validation
• Audit log hook for privileged actions; DLQ growth + stuck-run alerting
• Multi-tenancy namespacing; GDPR subject-tagged runs and purgeSubject() erasure
• Pino / Winston transports and Sentry error reporter
• OTLP span and metric export (in progress)
• SLSA-signed npm releases with build provenance (needs a tagged release to validate)
• Musl / Alpine prebuilds for Docker via zig cross-compile (needs a release run to validate)

In progress#

• OTLP telemetry export — span and metric wire export; schedule-to-start latency, trace-context propagation, GenAI semantic conventions
• Dashboard React SPA refactor — dedicated agent session browser, dollar cost display, richer run graph
• Framework-specific plugins — dedicated Fastify plugin, Hono middleware, and Nest.js module wrappers
• Signed releases — SLSA build provenance via OIDC, CycloneDX SBOM, Sigstore signing
• Alpine / musl prebuilds — zig cross-compile for Docker Alpine images without a build step

Coming soon#

• npm prebuilds for all platforms — today ZenZip requires building from source (Rust + Node). Prebuilt binaries for macOS, Linux x64/arm64, Windows, and musl ship with the public alpha.
• Modular package split — import only the primitives you need; tree-shakeable bundles.
• Realtime / WebSocket layer — first-class WebSocket support built on the existing run subscription API.
• SQLite → Postgres migration tool — lift an existing embedded deployment onto the multi-node backend without draining first.
• Postgres time/status partitioning — further scale improvements for high-volume deployments.
• eslint-plugin-zenzip — static analysis for side effects outside step.run, per-step retry overrides.

Post-1.0 backlog#

• Visual workflow authoring — the step-graph dashboard view ships first; a drag-and-drop editor comes later
• Python SDK on the same Rust core
• Redis / NATS event backends; managed vector memory for agents
• Hosted cloud — the eventual business model; OSS-first until then