686d02755f
- new pi-durable.md: architecture (session/entry/document/task/submission), effect-sandwich semantics, structured concurrency, storage backends, maturity/adoption, taxonomy placement, implications for hermes-vm - empirical tests on @earendil-works/pi-durable 1.3.0 (Node 22.22.2): kill -9 mid-phase (memo vs plain), kill -9 mid-tool (safe vs unsafe), SQLite schema; noted cold-open waitForTask race and the main-vs-1.3.0 version gap (sleepUntil/onWake/restartLimit/sleeping not published) - taxonomy: durable harness library added as a new primitive family - sources + next-steps updated
73 lines
6.7 KiB
Markdown
73 lines
6.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Durable Agent Runtime
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description: State & durability lens of agent infrastructure — durable objects (celld), actors (rivet), multi-hypervisor VM runtimes (hypeman, E2B/Amp Orbs), durable harness libraries (pi-durable), scale-to-zero/hibernation — and what they mean for building a self-hosted orb-like runtime on hermes-vm. Sibling of harness-engineering under the agent-infra umbrella.
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status: active
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category: technical
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tags: [durable-objects, actors, agent-runtime, agent-infra, sandbox, microvm, self-hosting, orbs, stateful, durable-execution, pi-durable]
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draft: true
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created: 2026-08-07
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updated: 2026-10-20
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origin: buzz://d8a718be-031f-4a6e-9f5c-a55466641654/4123d35532d0b2cbfb80a0a34f79fb3e4e63c16c25b77d43bc0f10bb178e4f1b
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---
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# Durable Agent Runtime
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## Summary
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Research into how modern agent execution environments achieve **durability and statefulness** — where agent state lives, what compute primitive runs the agent, and how the environment hibernates and wakes. Covers durable objects / durable execution (celld, rivet, Durable Objects), actor runtimes, durable harness libraries (pi-durable), and microVM sandboxes (hypeman, E2B/Amp Orbs). The harness/loop lens (nanocodex, pi, Code Mode) now lives in [[harness-engineering/index|Harness Engineering]]. Goal: derive a build plan for a self-hosted, orb-like runtime on our NixOS VM (hermes-vm) without overbuilding.
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## Research Question
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What are the architectural primitives for a durable, stateful agent runtime (sandboxed or not), and which combination fits a single self-hosted NixOS dev VM?
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## Scope
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- Included: durable objects / durable execution (celld, rivet, Durable Objects), actor runtimes, sandbox/VM runtimes (hypeman, E2B, Cloudflare isolates), scale-to-zero/hibernation, orbs
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- Excluded (moved): agent harness/loop engineering → [[harness-engineering/index|Harness Engineering]]; model training/inference infra, prompt engineering, RLHF
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- Sufficient answer: a taxonomy of primitives + a recommendation for what to build (and what NOT to build) on hermes-vm
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## Key Findings
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- **The 2026 pattern is unanimous**: agent compute is disposable, agent state is durable elsewhere. Amp: sandbox is ephemeral, the thread (prompts, tool calls, results) lives on the server. celld: nodes are replaceable, the S3 bucket is the source of truth. Rivet: actor state persists while the process may hibernate.
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- **Three primitive families emerged** (harness libraries split out to [[harness-engineering/index|Harness Engineering]]):
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1. Durable object/execution stores — celld (each object = its own SQLite DB, S3 replication, no consensus)
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2. Actor runtimes — rivet (in-memory state + persistence, ~20ms cold start, scale to zero, queues/workflows/scheduling)
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3. Sandbox/VM runtimes — hypeman (multi-hypervisor OCI-in-VM), E2B (Firecracker microVMs, snapshot restore, used as Amp's orb substrate)
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- **Scale-to-zero / hibernation is universal**: Amp orbs pause after 5 min idle; celld cells hibernate; rivet actors hibernate when idle; hypeman standby = snapshot VM to disk, resume in milliseconds; E2B snapshot reuse gives sub-30ms cold starts.
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- **Two hard problems everyone solves**: (a) cold start latency (actor ~20ms vs VM ~30s, mitigated by snapshot/pooling), (b) state checkpointing and recovery (SQLite replication, thread JSONL, VM snapshots, actor state persistence).
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- **For our stack**: hermes-vm is already a durable compute host (systemd services, kanban DB, session DBs, herdr panes). The real gap is a per-task disposable environment contract + event wake, not a distributed state layer. celld/rivet solve problems we don't have on a single box; hypeman is interesting for per-task VMs but likely overkill.
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- **A new primitive family emerged (2026-10-01): the durable harness library.** `@earendil-works/pi-durable` commits the agent loop itself — transcript entries, documents, tasks, submissions — and resumes unfinished work on reopen. It is substrate-agnostic: Node + SQLite/JSONL, or one Session per Cloudflare Durable Object. Its semantics are the interesting part: phases are at-least-once, tool effects are opt-in replay (`safe` vs `interrupted`), and only submission admission is exactly-once (`requestId`). See [[durable-agent-runtime/pi-durable|pi-durable]].
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## Sources
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For the full reference list see [[durable-agent-runtime/sources|Sources]].
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## Detail Files
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- [[durable-agent-runtime/sources|Sources]] — full reference list
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- [[durable-agent-runtime/analysis|Analysis]] — taxonomy, comparison matrix, implications for our build
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- [[durable-agent-runtime/pi-durable|pi-durable]] — deep dive + crash/replay experiments on `@earendil-works/pi-durable` 1.3.0 (2026-10-20)
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- [[durable-agent-runtime/agent-collaboration|Agent-Native Collaboration]] — agents as first-class signed participants (Radicle COBs / delegates / namespaces)
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- [[durable-agent-runtime/next-steps|Next Steps]] — follow-up questions and build plan
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## Related Research
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- [[agent-infra/index|Agent Infrastructure]] — umbrella topic
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- [[harness-engineering/index|Harness Engineering]] — agent loop & tool interface lens (split out 2026-08-11)
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- [[codex-app-server-byo-auth/index|Codex App Server & BYO Auth]] — model access & embedding protocols
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- Amp Orbs research note (workspace): `RESEARCH/AMP_ORBS_REMOTE_DEV.md`
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- Prime Agent / Continual Harness (arXiv 2605.09998) — self-improving harness state
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## Discussion
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Triggered from the Amp Orbs thread (2026-08-07). User connected the dots: orbs, nanocodex, durable objects (celld), actors (rivet), multi-hypervisor VM runtimes (hypeman), and Cloudflare Code Mode all belong to one research area — "durable object, stateful machine, harness engineering either sandboxed or not." Asked for centralized structured research he can digest. Completed directly (all primary sources already extracted; delegation channel has known instability). On 2026-08-11 the topic was narrowed to the state/durability lens and placed under the agent-infra umbrella; harness engineering split out.
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## Next Steps
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- [ ] Decide Phase 1 scope: per-repo `.agents/setup`-style contracts + AGENTS.md per repo on hermes-vm
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- [ ] Evaluate hypeman as an opt-in per-task VM runtime (snapshot/standby) vs NixOS containers
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- [ ] Decide whether to prototype pi-durable (Node/SQLite) for one long-running multi-client agent service, or only borrow its semantics for Hermes core (see [[durable-agent-runtime/pi-durable|pi-durable]] §Implications)
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## Conclusion
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The research area is **durable, stateful agent runtime — sandboxed or not**. Three primitive families cover the space; for a single self-hosted NixOS VM the right move is environment contracts + event wake on the existing durable host, not building a distributed durable-object layer. The tool-interface half of the original question now lives in [[harness-engineering/index|Harness Engineering]].
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