Tag: xstate

Why the May 2026 state-machine story is not finite automata becoming fashionable again, but durable execution becoming the reliability boundary for agents, workflow engines, and document-heavy product systems.

Outcome: Reader can distinguish statechart formalism from durable execution, pick the right runtime for agents and long-running workflows, and model document-heavy product lifecycles with explicit states, transitions, checkpoints, and ownership.

Why a hand-rolled retry double-charged a Stripe customer because the cancel state was implicit, and what XState 5's setup-plus-actors model gives you that useReducer does not.

Outcome: Reader can write an XState 5 machine using the setup pattern, distinguish invoked from spawned actors, decide when to graduate from useReducer to a state machine library, and read XState code as a structured argument rather than a configuration object.