Roadmap

The alpha (currently 0.2.0-alpha.1) is the minimum implementation that proves the thesis: a developer-supplied control plane compiles to validated LWIR and executes durably enough for a local development loop. Everything below is direction, not a shipped release. Dates and version numbers are deliberately omitted — the shape of the work is what matters.

Composition on the Harness surface

The orchestrator is deprecated in favour of asHarnessWorkflow + createHarness({ workflows }), and is scheduled to be unexported in the next minor:

• Plan once, run many on the Harness surface. Prepared runs would let an agent plan a workflow once and run the compiled version across many inputs. The protocol already reserves prepareForHarness / runPreparedForHarness, but neither side implements them yet. Until they do, this pattern stays on the orchestrator; see Plan once, run many.
• Bridging a workflow run's events into the calling agent's trace as a nested span. Today they stay in the workflow's own run record.

Beta polish

A hardened SDK and governance surface built on the same primitives:

• Approval workflows and structured memory query tools.
• Cost and budget enforcement at sub-workflow boundaries, plus pre-run cost estimation. Alpha ships cost observability (usage.costUsd, little report).
• Memory versioning and an audit log — alpha uses plain files plus mtime; explicit version objects and content_sha256 preconditions come later.
• Run-time skill injection via RunWorkflowOptions.skills — alpha supports workflow-declared and org-mounted skills only.
• An inspection CLI beyond events / replay / report: run listing, timelines, user-invoked retry-from-step, and fork.

Production durability

Moving beyond the single-process Local World:

• Postgres / Redis / S3-backed durability for the event log, run locks, and artifacts.
• The full capability firewall across model, tool, skill, code, shell, network, and side-effect access, including a secret broker and an egress allowlist (LWIR rejects permissions.secrets / permissions.network until then).
• A built-in sandboxed code.run executor. Today the default worker harness refuses to execute code.run.
• OpenTelemetry-based observability.

High-throughput fan-out and ecosystem

• Sharded fan-out and tree reducers for large parallel workloads (alpha caps a parallel step at 100 branches).
• Live OpenRouter model-registry sync (alpha ships a bundled registry).
• Dreaming — consolidating memory and outcomes across many sessions into proposed improvements. It is not part of the @little-stack/workflow package. It exists today only in the LittleDB service (its reviewer and proposals) and the demos/ that use it (kb-chatbot, support-desk), and LittleDB is not public yet.
• Streaming harness-session events to runWorkflow callers (alpha sessions stream internally; the caller receives final output and an optional progress callback).

Enterprise authoring and inspection

• Custom step types and recursive pipelines.
• Visual workflow authoring and inspection.

See the Changelog for what has actually shipped, and Comparisons for where Little Workflow sits next to other tools.