Big Arrow vs Restate

Big Arrow

An agent can show a person which control to click, with a labelled arrow that needs no permission to draw, never takes focus and always removes itself. The tool is a week old at version 0.4.6, runs only on macOS, reports no answer beyond how an arrow ended, and has no security policy.

Restate

An awakeable pauses a handler at no compute cost and resumes it from one HTTP request, with a durable timeout, on a free plan of 100,000 actions a month. Restate sends nothing to the approver, so the Slack message, email or inbox is the builder's code, and the published terms and privacy statement predate the paid plans.

Big Arrow

1. Open the exact System Settings pane or URL first, then point at the one control left for the person
2. Write the sign as a full sentence that names the action and, for approvals or payments, what the click does
3. Pass --app or --window for any target inside an app, so it is raised and the arrow hides while covered
4. On exit 4, run bigarrow doctor and ask the person to grant Accessibility to the app running your shell, not to bigarrow
5. Call bigarrow stop once the step is done, and add bigarrow stop --hook as a Claude Code UserPromptSubmit hook

Restate

1. Create the awakeable, send its ID inside ctx.run, then await the promise, so a retry doesn't send a second approval request
2. Resolve with POST /restate/awakeables/<id>/resolve and a JSON body, or /reject with a text reason, which throws a terminal error in the handler
3. On Restate Cloud send Authorization: Bearer key_... to https://<env_id>.env.<region>.restate.cloud:8080. On a self-hosted server put an authenticating proxy in front of port 8080
4. Wrap the wait in orTimeout and decide what a timeout means. Without it the handler waits with no limit
5. Retry ingress errors only on 408, 425, 429 or 5xx, and only when x-restate-error-source isn't invocation