This is good, actually

Use client, use server, use workflow, use step, use convex, use cloudflare, use Verscell. What's going on with all of these directives? Why is everyone freaking out? Well, as usual, it's our favorite stirer of drama, Verscell. They just announced the workflows SDK, and everyone is getting upset because of this particular slide and what it means. Directives are here to stay, it seems. If you're not familiar with directives, it's a string that you put inside of your JavaScript code that is used to indicate specific behaviors. These started with the classic use strict

which was a way to try and change some behaviors in JavaScript to deprecate some not so great things and let you as a developer opt into the new behaviors. It hasn't been used very much since then. Verscell's kind of commandeered this alongside the React team in order to sneak behaviors into the framework. The big case for this is client and server components where you're dictating what code runs where. Use server is a way to say this function runs on the server and when you call it on the client it's effectively an API call to the server and use client says this code

and the code in this file should be bundled up and sent to the client so that it can run there as well. So what are use workflow and use step? These are attempts to make more durable executions for your JavaScript code which is a very exciting thing. I can only tell you more about it but first we have to use sponsor. I have an incredibly unfair advantage as the CEO of my startup the ability to hire. Most companies don't have access to thousands of engineers ready to go to work on whatever time frame and whatever scale you need for your projects. The only way to plug that gap that I know of is today's sponsor,

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days. We'll never go back to hiring the old way. If you're tired of hiring in the stone ages and you want to do it right, check them out now at soyv.link/2i. There are going to be a couple steps to this one today. pun not intended, but we'll go with it. A few things we're going to need to talk about as we go through. First, of course, what is the workflows SDK? Two, what other options exist? And of course, number three, why is everyone so upset? Because a lot of

people are upset. In particular, Tanner Lindsay, who as you guys know is a good friend and one of the smartest people I know. He has feelings and I actually don't think I agree. He did write a blog post which is one of the many things we'll be going through. I have a bad feeling this is going to be a long video. So, let's start at the top level of what the hell are workflows and what is this workflow SDK. The simplest way I can put it is it's a way to take a function in JavaScript and break it up into pieces that can rerun over long amounts of time and execute in ways that you wouldn't normally execute a function. Traditionally, when you write

JavaScript, it goes line after line after line calling whatever functions you have inside of it. and it will probably hit things throughout, especially if you have a lot of async await calls. Like what happens if this fails? What do you do? Do you go up a level and retry the whole function cuz like we got the user fine, we generated the email fine, but then the send failed. Do we retry at the top level and go through it again? Do we maybe write send email in a way where it retries itself three times? What if we wanted to send another email a week from now? There are so many things that are hard to do when you have these workflows that