The bot that lied to cricket fans with a straight face: Temporal x San Francisco Unicorns
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A developer at Temporal built a WhatsApp chatbot for San Francisco Unicorns cricket fans, powered by Gemini for natural language and Temporal Workflows for durable execution. The bot handled match reminders, live score polling, and post-match summaries for 500+ fans. A key incident revealed the bot was serving stale scores due to a misconfigured API quota guard — not a Temporal failure, but a logic bug the author wrote. The post reflects on how durable execution handled retries, restarts, and long-running polls reliably, while also covering WhatsApp platform quirks like the 24-hour messaging window, webhook deduplication, and template message requirements.
