What is an Agent?

An agent is the fundamental unit of work in Nexus OS. It's a self-contained program that receives input, performs a task, and produces output.

Agent Properties

Every agent has:

Agent Lifecycle

created → stopped → running → completed
                       ↓
                    failed → restarted (by supervisor)
                       ↓
                 budget_exceeded → paused

What Agents Can Do

Agents can:

• Call LLMs (Claude, GPT-4, etc.)
• Process data
• Make HTTP requests (if granted permission)
• Read/write files (if granted permission)
• Communicate with other agents

What Agents Cannot Do (by default)

The WASM sandbox prevents agents from:

• Accessing the file system
• Making network requests
• Reading environment variables
• Spawning processes
• Accessing other agents' memory

These capabilities must be explicitly granted in the agent configuration.

Agent vs. Traditional Programs