---
title: Agent Infrastructure
description: Umbrella topic for the substrate layer agents run on — compute/sandbox, state/durability, harness/loop engineering, model access & auth, collaboration/identity. Subtopic hub: durable-agent-runtime, harness-engineering, codex-app-server-byo-auth, radicle-decentralized-git.
status: active
category: technical
tags: [agent-infra, agent-runtime, harness, sandbox, durable-execution, byok, agent-protocols, self-hosting, orchestration]
draft: true
created: 2026-08-11
updated: 2026-08-11
origin: buzz://d8a718be-031f-4a6e-9f5c-a55466641654/c66f017974f748bd6db019c913d3a6f59de349e0cbd90ae38c222e9640521d63
---

# Agent Infrastructure

## Summary

Umbrella topic for **agent infrastructure** — everything between the model and the user's product: what compute the agent runs on, where its state lives, how the agent loop is harnessed, how it gets model access, and how agents collaborate. Replaces the narrower "durable agent runtime" framing as the general home for this research area; each lens lives in a subtopic below.

## Subtopic Map

- [[durable-agent-runtime/index|Durable Agent Runtime]] — state & durability lens: durable objects (celld), actors (rivet), VM sandboxes (E2B, hypeman), scale-to-zero/hibernation, orbs
- [[harness-engineering/index|Harness Engineering]] — agent loop & tool interface lens: nanocodex, pi, Codex protocols, code-as-tool-interface (Cloudflare Code Mode), skills/plugins
- [[codex-app-server-byo-auth/index|Codex App Server & BYO Auth]] — model access & auth lens: embedding protocols, ChatGPT managed/external-token/API-key auth, BYOK harness pattern
- [[radicle-decentralized-git/index|Decentralized Git (Radicle)]] — collaboration & identity lens: P2P forges, COBs as signed collaboration objects, agents as first-class participants

## Research Question

What does it take to run durable, stateful, sandboxed agents on our own infrastructure (hermes-vm), and where do we buy vs build?

## Key Findings

- **The 2026 convergence** (evidence in the subtopics): compute is disposable, state is durable elsewhere; and the harness should look like a programming environment, not a tool-call menu (code-as-tool-interface).
- **For a single self-hosted box**: build environment contracts (setup hooks, AGENTS.md, event wake) on the existing durable host; don't build a distributed durable-object layer, actor platform, or VM fleet.
- **Model access is a composable layer**: BYO-ChatGPT / BYOK is a model-access grant, not identity — one provider interface, multiple implementations (Effect Layer pattern).

## Detail Files

Subtopic index pages are the entry points; each carries its own analysis / sources / next-steps.

## Related Research

- Workspace notes: `RESEARCH/AMP_ORBS_REMOTE_DEV.md`, `RESEARCH/CODEX_APP_SERVER.md`
- [[durable-agent-runtime/agent-collaboration|Agent-Native Collaboration]] — agents as first-class signed participants (Radicle COBs)

## Discussion

Restructured 2026-08-11 per user request: the main topic should be more general than "durable agent runtime" / "harness engineering". Created as umbrella hub; durable-agent-runtime narrowed to the state/durability lens, harness-engineering split out as its own topic (absorbing the Cloudflare Code Mode finding), existing topics tagged `agent-infra` and linked from here.

## Next Steps

- [ ] Keep subtopics as the granular home for new research; add new subtopics (sandboxing, orchestration, identity) under this umbrella as they emerge
- [ ] seo-playbook stays outside this umbrella (product/market lane)