Why not Airflow/Prefect/dbt/etc?

Those are heavy DAG engines for distributed orchestration.

StepChain is for the inner loop: inside your function, microservice, or Lambda.
It complements those tools, not replaces them.

Use StepChain when you want: - Minimal dependencies and tiny cold start - Functional composition and fast unit tests - Inline retries, deadlines, hooks, and logging — without a platform