Glossary
Agent runtime
Also called: agent harness, agent framework
Definition
An agent runtime is the software harness that runs an agent: it holds the loop, manages context, and exposes the tools the agent is allowed to call.
In practice
The runtime is not the model and not the host. The model supplies the reasoning, the host supplies the machine, and the runtime is the layer between them that decides how the agent is configured, what a tool call looks like, and how conversation and state are kept. OpenClaw, Hermes, and the OpenAI Codex CLI are all runtimes. Because the runtime shapes how you author an agent, moving between them is a rewrite rather than a setting. Choose the host first, because that decides whether an agent can run on a schedule at all, then choose the runtime.
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Nearby terms
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