Core concepts

Every Nori setup is described by the same handful of ideas. Learn these once and the rest of the docs read easily.

Agent

The thing doing the work — a coding agent that reads your repo, edits files, runs commands, and reports back. Nori is deliberately agent-agnostic: it runs many agents rather than shipping its own.

Harness

The program that hosts an agent’s loop — Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, and others. Nori speaks to harnesses through a common surface (including the Agent Client Protocol, ACP) so you can swap the harness without changing your workflow. Any harness.

Provider (token)

The model API behind the agent, and the credentials for it. You bring your own token — Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, or another. Any token provider.

Integrations

The outside world the agent can touch — Slack, GitHub, Google Workspace, Linear, and more — wired in per org. Any integrations.

Compute

Where the agent actually runs. Managed Sessions place each run on a secure cloud VM from a pluggable backend (Sprites or Modal today), selected per fleet. The compute layer is designed to be swappable. Eventually, any compute.

Two altitudes: managed vs. composable

Nori is the same idea at two levels:

• Managed — Sessions runs the whole loop for you: it picks the machine, holds the credentials, and streams results to Slack. Fully-managed agents, zero infrastructure.
• Composable — the open-source CLI and Skillsets, plus Handroll, let you assemble your own multi-agent cloud from the same primitives, on your own terms.

Keep these five words in mind — agent, harness, provider, integrations, compute — and every page tells you which one it’s about.