Temporal vs withHuman

Temporal

Waits of any length with a timeout survive worker restarts and deploys. No reviewer inbox, notifications or routing, so the human side is all your code.

withHuman

The approval API is small and carefully specified, with a public OpenAPI 3.1 document, mandatory idempotency keys and agent credentials that can never approve. The service is in early access under its own terms, with no status page, published rate limits or changelog, and the open-source repository the site links to returned 404 on 8 October 2026.

Temporal

1. Put the decision in a typed Signal payload (approver, decision, comments, timestamp) instead of a bare boolean
2. Always wait with a timeout and treat the timeout path as a rejection or an escalation on purpose
3. Use the workflow ID as the approval ID, so the reviewer's tool only needs one value to send the Signal
4. Use an Update instead of a Signal when the approver's tool needs an acknowledgement back
5. Expect ResourceExhausted under load and let the SDK retry it, since signals are throttled last

withHuman

1. Send an Idempotency-Key header on POST /api/aap/v1/requests. The call answers 400 without one
2. Read the decision with GET /api/aap/v1/requests/{id}?wait=30s and repeat while status is pending. wait is capped at 30 seconds
3. Set timeout between one second and seven days, and treat expired and cancelled as a refusal
4. Start an approved call within five minutes of decided_at, because the decision carries an expires_at
5. Cancel a request when you stop waiting, so reviewers stop seeing it