Building a Durable Message Queue on SQLite for AI Agent Orchestration

I'm building a local AI agent orchestration tool. Multiple agents run asynchronously — user messages come in, executors return results, approvals fire callbacks. All of these are events, and they need to flow reliably through the system. The key word is reliably . An agent crashes mid-task. The process gets killed. The machine restarts. When things come back up, pending events must still be there, ready to retry. Losing an event means losing work. So I needed a durable message queue. But here's the constraint: this is a local developer tool, not a cloud service. Users install it with npm install and it should just work. Requiring them to run Redis or RabbitMQ — or any external process — is a non-starter. SQLite was already in the stack for persistent storage — and it has strong transactional guarantees. Could it also be the queue? Why not just a "jobs" table? The first instinct is to create a table with a status column and poll it: SELECT * FROM jobs WHERE status = 'pending' ORDER BY c