Core Concepts
The building blocks of clawREFORM. Understand these and you can build anything on the platform.
Agent
An autonomous unit of work with its own ID, model binding, budget envelope, skill set, and tool permissions. Agents persist across restarts.
Kernel
The core orchestrator. Spawns, manages, and terminates agents. Dispatches messages, enforces budgets, and coordinates with the runtime.
Skill
A declarative TOML pack that defines a system prompt, allowed tools, and constraints. Skills compose — an agent can load multiple skills simultaneously.
Channel
A communication adapter that connects agents to external platforms (Slack, Discord, Telegram, email, webhooks, etc.). Channels run as async tasks.
Wire Protocol (OFP)
Open Federation Protocol. TLS-encrypted peer-to-peer messaging between agents on different machines. Supports mDNS local discovery and configurable seed peers.
Budget
A spend limit attached to an agent or globally. The kernel tracks token usage and cost per call. Hard-stops agents that exceed their budget.
Tool
A callable function available to agents — file I/O, shell commands, HTTP requests, code execution. Tools are sandboxed with timeouts and output capture.
Runtime
The execution environment for agents. Runs the agent loop (message -> LLM -> tool calls -> response) and manages tool execution.
KernelHandle
A trait defined in clawreform-runtime, implemented on the kernel. Inverts the dependency so runtime can call kernel methods without importing the kernel crate.