I burned a week comparing Inngest and AWS Step Functions so you don't have to

The setup I was building an AI article generator. Four phases: Research — pull live SERP data, extract entities, score competitors Brief — Claude Sonnet writes a structured brief from the SERP Draft — section-by-section drafting in a fixed persona voice Polish — adversarial review pass that flags AI tells End-to-end: 6–8 minutes. Each phase: 60–180 seconds. Multiple LLM calls per phase. Token streaming back to the user the whole time. The first version was a single Vercel API route. It worked lo