Agent Runtimes & Harnesses
Establish the runtime as the architectural boundary between probabilistic model reasoning and deterministic enterprise execution.
Why This Matters
If the model owns tool calls, retries, and credentials, you do not have an architecture — you have a demo. The harness is where policy, state, and side effects become deterministic.
Architecture Position
The Runtime Layer sits under agents and above enterprise systems: harness, state, execution, and policy enforcement. See it on the architecture map.
Start Here
Core Concepts
Runtime Fundamentals
- What is an Agent Runtime?
- What is an AI Agent Harness?
- Agent loop vs runtime
Execution
- Tool dispatch
- Capability invocation
- Code execution
- Runtime boundaries
State
- Workflow state
- Checkpoints
- Durable execution
Reliability
- Retries
- Backoff
- Idempotency
Policy
- Sandboxing
- Policy enforcement
- Capability boundaries
Advanced
Advanced material
Deeper guides for this domain are on the way.
Coming SoonArchitecture Patterns
Applied patterns for this domain live in the pattern library.
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Enterprise walkthroughs that apply this topic in a full system.
Browse case studiesRelated Topics
Agents & Orchestration
What agents are, where they are appropriate, and how autonomous systems should be structured.
Open →Identity & Authorization
How humans, agents, and workloads establish identity and receive authority to act.
Open →AI Security & Trust
Threats created by probabilistic systems that retrieve data and take actions.
Open →Distributed Systems for AI
Classic production architecture connected to modern AI systems.
Open →Roadmaps
This topic appears in the Enterprise AI Architect path.
Follow the Enterprise AI Architect roadmap