Portable Agent Manifests with Host-Controlled Infrastructure

AI agents often begin as application code: a prompt, a model call, a few tools, and enough control flow to make the first example run. As the agent grows, the definition and the environment tend to collapse into each other. Model configuration lives beside credentials. Tool access is mixed with prompts. Persistence assumes a particular process. Deployment choices become part of the agent itself. That coupling makes an agent harder to inspect, test, move, and recover. We built Clear Ideas Agent Runtime around a different boundary: the agent definition should be portable, while the infrastructure that executes it should remain under host control. The Agent Manifest is the portable contract An Agent Manifest is a versioned YAML or TypeScript definition. It can describe: prompts and structured outputs; typed variables; conditions and loops; tools and MCP connections; approvals and webhooks; sandboxed code steps; sub-runs; limits and final outputs. A separate Agent Run Manifest supplies the values and execution choices for one invocation. That keeps the reusable agent definition distinct from the inputs and operational decisions associated with a particular run. Here is a small example: schemaVersion : " 1.0" name : research-brief variables : topic : type : string researchNotes : type : string briefDraft : type : string steps : - id : research type : prompt prompt : | Research {{ topic }} and return concise notes. outputVariable : researchNotes - id : draft type : prompt prompt : | Draft a brief using these notes: {{ researchNotes }} outputVariable : briefDraft The manifest describes the agent. It does not contain the credentials, infrastructure account, or persistence implementation that happens to run it. The host controls the operational boundary The host application supplies and controls: models and provider credentials; connections and tool authorization; persistence and artifact stores; local or remote compute; sandbox providers; telemetry; concurrency and resource