AWS Strands + Temporal vs loomcycle.

The AWS-blessed agent stack is a pair: Strands Harness SDK for the agent loop, Temporal for durable execution, Bedrock for the model, AgentCore for the runtime harness. On the paved path that's four systems, each with its own operator surface and its own bill. loomcycle is one ~80 MB Go binary that owns the loop and the durability and the memory and the teams and the snapshots itself.

What each one is

The hosting plan at 1,000 agents/day

A toy production workload to make the box count feel concrete: 1,000 agent runs per day, roughly fifteen steps per run, average ~15k input tokens and ~2k output per run against Claude Sonnet. Rough numbers from published Bedrock and Temporal Cloud prices; your workload will differ.

Where they overlap

Both own the agent loop (Strands does; Temporal + Strands together give it crash-safe replay; loomcycle does both in one process). Both are MCP native on both the client and server sides. Both expose A2A as a connection type. Both have a human-in-the-loop surface (Temporal Signals + Strands Hooks on one side; the Interruption tool on the other). Both route to many providers. Both are self-hostable without AWS at the base of the stack (Strands works outside AWS; Temporal self-hosts anywhere; loomcycle has no AWS dependency at all).

Capability matrix

Rows marked ✦ are where loomcycle's answer is materially different from Strands + Temporal's. Some of those rows favour loomcycle, some favour the pair; the mark flags a real divergence, not a value judgement.

Where Strands + Temporal fit better

Straightforward cases. Pick the pair if:

• Your production is on AWS and your durability contract is Temporal's. Workflow history as the source of truth, Signals for everything, operators who already run a Temporal cluster. Loomcycle's one-binary durability is a different shape, not a superset of Temporal's.
• Your buyer signs off on AWS-branded reference architectures and the "Bedrock + AgentCore + Strands + Temporal" naming is load-bearing in the procurement doc. Real constraint. loomcycle does not solve that constraint.
• You already pay Temporal Cloud for other workflows and the agent stack rides on the same tenant. The marginal cost of adding an agent workload is near zero; the loomcycle alternative removes a cost you are not actually paying.
• You need Temporal-grade workflow guarantees (determinism replay, versioning, exactly-once activity semantics) for the orchestration between agents, where the orchestration is the valuable part. loomcycle's durability covers runs, not arbitrary workflows.
• You want to run on Lambda Serverless Workers and scale the agent fleet to zero between bursts. Temporal's new serverless-workers preview is the only end-to-end story that lands this today.

Where loomcycle fits better

Also straightforward. Pick loomcycle if:

• You want one binary, not two systems. The agent loop, the durability, the memory, the teams, the snapshots, the HTTP + gRPC + MCP + WebSocket surface — one process. No Temporal cluster to operate, no Postgres required for a dev workload, no AgentCore account.
• You want the hosting plan to shrink, not grow. Removing the durability engine as a separately-operated system removes about $100-plus/mo at the toy workload above, and removes four Temporal services from the operator's night. The same inference bill lands on either stack; the daylight is the ops line.
• You want a Decision model as a general primitive. The Decision tool takes choice, noul or score questions and returns calibrated probabilities; model aliases are kind-typed. Strands has a structured-output guide; it is not a trained decision model.
• You want teams as a single declarative file. TeamDef nodes (agent, decision, parallel, consolidator), transitions, pushback edges and iteration caps in one document. On Strands + Temporal the equivalent shape splits across Strands agent code and Temporal workflow code; a diff of the team is a diff of two systems.
• You want multi-tenancy as a primitive, not a pattern. loomcycle folds identity on every read; a tenant cannot see another tenant's defs, memory, documents or snapshots.
• You care about the memory benchmark. Bi-temporal + subject-document identity with LoCoMo 0.74; a decision-model reranker lifting LoCoMo recall@5 from 0.588 → 0.740. The Strands + Bedrock Knowledge Base path has not published a comparable number.
• You want to run on a VPS, a homelab NAS, an air-gapped machine, or your laptop and have the same primitives everywhere. Strands + self-hosted Temporal gets there with work; loomcycle gets there with ./loomcycle serve.

A note on the rename and the paved path

AWS launched Strands as an open-source agent SDK in 2024, released Strands Harness in September 2026, and consolidated the SDK docs under the /harness-sdk/ URL. The install name on PyPI is still strands-agents; the pair with Temporal is formalised through the Temporal SDK Plugin (pip install "temporalio[strands-agents]") and the joint AWS APN reference architecture. "AWS-blessed" here means the paved path, not an acquisition. The pair is portable (Strands + self-hosted Temporal + any model) if you take the paved tiles off.

curl -L https://github.com/denn-gubsky/loomcycle/releases/latest/download/loomcycle-$(uname -s | tr A-Z a-z)-$(uname -m) -o loomcycle
chmod +x loomcycle
./loomcycle serve --config loomcycle.yaml