Atuin’s New Runbook Execution Engine

Summary

We're excited to announce a major architectural improvement to Atuin Desktop: a completely redesigned runbook execution engine.This is a huge change, the first big step toward making runbooks a core automation primitive. If you’ve ever hit flaky context, disappearing state, or inconsistent execution, this release fixes it. Runbooks now keep their state, behave predictably, and don’t require constant re-running just to get back to where you were. We're laying the foundation for enhanced real-time collaboration and CLI-based execution.What's New?PersistentRunbooks stay how you left them. No rebuilds. No re-running blocks. No friction.Previously, when you closed a tab or restarted Atuin Desktop, all execution state was lost. With the new execution engine, your runbook's context - which stores all of the execution-related state - now persists across app restarts and tab closures.In practice, this means that if you run a command like mktemp -d to create a tempflorary directory and save it to a template variable, that output is now saved locally along with your runbook. Close the tab or restart the app, and the context is still there - no need to re-execute blocks to rebuild your working environment.ReproducibleRunbooks behave the way you expect, every time.The new engine establishes a clear, predictable flow of context through your runbooks. Each block in your document can only influence the blocks below it. This means that, for example, setting a template variable in a block will not affect that same variable's usage in any blocks above it.A block’s context only affects blocks below itWith the fundamentals fixed, we pushed the template system further:Templates EverywhereWe now run all user input through our template system. This means you can use templates in variable names, context blocks like directory and SSH, and any other block that accepts input. If you find any input that doesn’t behave this way, it’s a bug and we’d love to know about it!Self-Referential Variable...