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Restructure agent research under agent-infra umbrella

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- Add agent-infra umbrella topic (hub for state, harness, model-access, collaboration lenses)
- Split harness-engineering out of durable-agent-runtime; fold in Cloudflare Code Mode finding
- Narrow durable-agent-runtime to state/durability lens; retitle
- Tag codex-app-server-byo-auth as agent-infra subtopic
- Document umbrella-topic convention in README
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hermes 2026-08-11 08:16:18 +00:00
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durable-agent-runtime/analysis.md
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# Analysis — Durable Agent Runtimes & Harness Engineering
# Analysis — Durable Agent Runtime
> Part of [[durable-agent-runtime/index|Durable Agent Runtimes & Harness Engineering]]
> Part of [[durable-agent-runtime/index|Durable Agent Runtime]]
> Harness/loop analysis moved to [[harness-engineering/index|Harness Engineering]] (2026-08-11).
## The four primitive families
## The three primitive families
| Family | Example | Compute primitive | Where state lives | Cold start | Hibernation |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Durable objects | celld (Deno) | V8 isolate running Worker bundles | Per-object SQLite, replicated to S3 | Fast (isolate) | Idle cells hibernate |
| Actors | rivet | Lightweight process (Node/Bun/Deno) | In-memory + SQLite/BYO DB | ~20ms | Actors hibernate when idle |
| VM sandboxes | hypeman, E2B | Firecracker/Cloud Hypervisor/QEMU microVM | VM disk (snapshot for standby) | ~30s VM / sub-30ms from snapshot | standby = snapshot to disk |
| Harness libraries | nanocodex, Codex, pi | In-process agent loop (WebSocket to LLM) | In-process session / thread store | Instant | N/A (client-side) |
| Collaborative substrate | Radicle COBs | Signed, CRDT-like Git commit DAGs | Git objects (replicated, self-certifying) | Instant (local git) | Repos persist; nodes sync on demand |
(Harness libraries — nanocodex, Codex, pi — moved to [[harness-engineering/index|Harness Engineering]].)
The industry convergence: **compute is disposable, state is durable elsewhere.**
- Amp orbs: ephemeral E2B sandbox + durable thread on Amp Server (PostgreSQL). Sandbox destroyed on archive; conversation survives.
@ -24,16 +26,6 @@ The industry convergence: **compute is disposable, state is durable elsewhere.**
1. **Cold start latency** — the gap between "VM ~30s" and "actor ~20ms" is closed with snapshots (E2B, hypeman standby, celld/rivet hibernation) or pre-provisioned pools. This is why orbs can feel local despite being remote.
2. **State checkpointing & recovery** — thread JSONL (Amp), SQLite replication (celld), actor state persistence (rivet), VM disk snapshots (hypeman). Everything is replayable; nothing is lost on compute failure.
## Tool interaction: code as the tool interface
Three independent sources converge on the same insight:
- **Cloudflare Code Mode**: present MCP tools as a generated TypeScript API and let the LLM write code that calls it. LLMs are trained on billions of lines of real code but only contrived tool-call token sequences. Writing code also skips feeding every intermediate tool result back through the context window.
- **nanocodex**: typed `Turn`/`TurnResult` values + event stream over WebSocket instead of stdout parsing. "stdout parsing for agent loops breaks constantly in edge cases; typed events give reliable state checkpoints and clean prompt cache hits."
- **Prime Agent RLM**: the model's only tool is a persistent IPython REPL; context is a variable, subagents are function calls.
The unifying pattern: **the harness should look like a programming environment, not a tool-call menu.** This matters directly for how we build agent environments on hermes-vm (and why pi's minimalism / 4-tool philosophy won).
## What this means for hermes-vm (our stack)
Already have (the "durable compute host" layer):
@ -52,7 +44,6 @@ Not worth building on a single box:
Interesting but optional:
- **hypeman** — if we ever want real per-task VM isolation with snapshot/standby on our own box, hypeman is the lean OSS option (multi-hypervisor, OCI images, ms restore). Watch it; don't adopt yet.
- **Cloudflare Code Mode pattern** — worth revisiting for our Effect TS stack: present our MCP/REST tools as a typed API and let agents write code against them, rather than exposing raw tool-call schemas.
## Verdict