Lobster is a local-first workflow runtime for AI agents, implemented as a TypeScript CLI and embeddable SDK. It executes deterministic pipelines defined in JSON, YAML, or .lobster files: steps are shell commands or built-in pipeline commands (where, pick, map, sort, groupBy, table, approve, ask, llm.invoke, openclaw.agent, etc.) connected through typed async-iterator data flow rather than text pipes. Pipelines support approval gates, interactive input, parallel branches, for_each loops, retry/timeout policies, on_error handlers, cost limits, and persistent state that can be suspended and resumed via base64url resume tokens. Architecturally it is a modular Node.js application: a core runtime (src/runtime.ts, src/core/tool_runtime.ts) with a command registry, a workflow file loader/executor, an atomic-file state store, an LLM cost-tracking and accounting layer, and a small SDK (src/sdk/index.ts). CLI entry points are bin/lobster.js, bin/openclaw.invoke.js, and bin/clawd.invoke.js. The package also ships GitHub and Gmail recipes that shell out to the gh and gog CLIs, and can delegate agent turns to OpenClaw. External dependencies are limited to those CLIs, the OpenClaw gateway/LLM adapters, and Node.js >= 22. Notable engineering strengths are crash-safe state persistence, idempotent LLM spend accounting, retry/backoff, abortable process-tree cancellation, and extensive tests covering resume, cancellation, concurrency, and billing edge cases. The repository is unambiguously an application; it has no data-research pipelines, notebooks, or analytics assets. It is a well-maintained, thoughtfully structured codebase with several independently reusable Node.js components.