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What is an Agent Runtime?

For an agent to be truly autonomous, it must operate continuously, ready to process new requests in real time. This is precisely the role of AgentRuntime. It is the core orchestration layer that manages agent execution, ensuring that messages are processed efficiently while maintaining the agent’s state.

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How It Works

At a high level, the Agent Runtime follows this execution loop:

  1. Receive a Message – An input client sends a message to the runtime.
  2. Process the Message – The agent receives and handles the request.
  3. Send the Response – The agent’s output is forwarded to the appropriate client.
  4. Repeat – The runtime continuously handles incoming messages in a loop.

AgentRuntime interface is defined as follows

class AgentRuntime:
    def __init__(
            self,
            # Any number of input Clients
            inputs: List[AgentInput],
            # Any number of output Clients
            outputs: List[AgentOutput],
            # The agent to run
            agent: Agent,
            # optional short term memory - more on that later
            short_term_memory: Optional[ShortTermMemory] = None,
            # optional pricing - more on that later
            pricing: Optional[Pricing] = None,
    ):
        ...

The Agent Runtime **can handle any number of input/output clients concurrently, making it easy to implement all kinds of agents that can handle various workflows.

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Using AgentRuntime

Based on the interface above, here’s an example of how the runtime is created.

runtime = AgentRunTime(
	inputs=[cron, discord], # Specify which input clients should trigger agent execution
	outputs=[twitter], # Specify which output clients should publish agent's results
	agent=agent, # Specify which agent should be executed
)

The creation of the runtime is lightweight as it doesn’t start listening to inputs nor trigger the agent execution. In order to start the runtime process, its AgentRuntime#run must be called.

asyncio.run(runtime.run())

Note that in order to run infinitely and asynchronously respond to inputs, AgentRuntime#run is async function. Therefore, it has to be passed to asyncio.run.

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Conclusion

The Agent Runtime is the backbone of autonomous agent execution, enabling seamless integration and scalability. It’s main responsibilities are:

  • Orchestration – the runtime ties the agent execution flow together. It enables Agents to run indefinitely and autonomously. Handles multiple concurrent clients
  • Validation - manages the types of messages coming in and making sure they are valid
  • Integration – Supports multiple input/output sources, enabling build complex agents. It can be extended with additional components like memory and pricing