What is a managed agent? transcript

So, we've been getting a lot of questions about what a manage agent really is. So, I want to explain what that term manage agent is and where the line sits between what you're expected to define and what infrastructure a manage agent should handle. So, until now, an agent has been a local process. Cloud code runs in your terminal, and so everything that the agent is lives in that process's memory. It's simple. Your files and credentials are already there.

But that ties the agent's life to a process's life. And we learned this the hard way. The very first version of Amnaro was a remote control for your agents from your phone. And this architecture constantly causes headaches. A closed laptop will actually kill the agent mid task because it's literally just a process. We wrote all sorts of hacks to recover that agent. But by and large, the agent was trapped in one interface.

You couldn't easily hand it between machines or give it to another teammate because the agent was the process. And also agents spent most of their lives just waiting between inputs or between tool calls. And so it still had to stay alive during that whole time or it was gone. And that was just a waste of resources. So if you strip an agent down, it's really just a loop. It calls a model, it runs tools, and it repeats.

This is taken from Dex's 12actor agents. And the big idea here is that you can just take the agents state out of this loop. And so infrastructure can run this loop against that state and that changes what the agent is. It's no longer the process on the machine. It's actually a durable object. And so a new agent is not a new process. It's actually it's a new row in a database. And so it can survive crashes, things going offline.

And any interface can reach it. The terminal, the phone, Slack, it can wait days for no cost because you don't have to keep a process alive. And then any machine, so sandboxes or your own laptop or VMs or containers, they can all attach to it like tools when there's work and then detach when there isn't. So this is super cool. Like an agent can outlive this for loop that really is the agent. The agent is data and everybody's waking up to this now.

So the main point of this video was to show you this. Here's the boundary. Okay, above this control plane you see we have business logic and this is the judgment that you provide. So nobody can provide this part for you but this is where you define what the agent's job is, which models it uses, which tools it has, what permissions it has, which machines it can work on. And this is a configuration. And then below the line you have the infrastructure that runs the loop.

It saves every step as it happens so things don't get lost. It holds questions open until a human answers them. It can allow you to stream the agent live. It also governs access. So it's also responsible for who can do what. And then you can see at the bottom here the durable log in our case the database is what actually holds the state or the identity of the agent. You'll also see here what we call an execution plane.

So this is all the machines that the agent can use as execution environments and the way we handle that is we have a damon that initiates an outbound connection and that can be ran on any machine. So that's what allows you to bring your laptop we call it by machines to the control plane. So in closing that's what managed means. You describe the agent you want and the infrastructure runs that and we built that layer. It's called Nara.

It's open source. It's self-hostable. There are other alternatives out there like Claude manage agents and Gemini manage agents, but we believe that you should own your data and you shouldn't be locked into a specific model and you should be able to run everything yourself, bring your own machines even and that's really really important especially with how much these model providers want to own more and more of the stack and compete.

And that's why we're super excited about Omnara. It's the foundation for building agent products for your team or your users.