---
title: What is Nori
description: Nori takes any team of AI coding agents cloud-native — any harness, any token provider, any integrations, any compute.
---

Nori is the most customizable stack for **background cloud agents**: proactive,
programmatic agent runs inside secure sandboxes, plus the open-source tooling to
drive any agent from anywhere. One idea runs through all of it — take any team of
AI coding agents **immediately cloud-native**, with any harness, any token
provider, any integrations, and (eventually) any compute.

## The problem

Coding agents are powerful on a laptop and stranded there. Moving them to the
cloud usually means picking one vendor's harness, one model provider, one
opinionated runtime — and rebuilding your workflow around it. Teams that want
many agents, running proactively, on their own compute, with their own
integrations, end up gluing it together themselves.

## Who Nori is for

- **Teams adopting agents at scale** who want managed agents they can start from
  Slack and trust in a sandbox — without babysitting a VM.
- **Builders of multi-agent systems** who want to bring their own harness, model
  keys, and compute, and compose the pieces themselves.
- **Open-source users** who just want one great terminal for every agent, and a
  registry of configurations that make those agents better.

## How you use it

Nori comes in two ways in — a fully-managed product and a composable open-source
core.

- **[Sessions](/sessions/)** — a managed cloud runtime. Start an agent in a
  secure sandbox from a Slack thread, hand it a task, and get results back. This
  is the "fully-managed agents in Slack" path.
- **[Handroll](/sessions/handroll/)** — the local terminal proxy that fronts an
  interactive agent and connects it to the cloud, with attach / detach / hand-off.
- **[CLI](/cli/)** *(open source)* — one native terminal for every provider:
  Claude, Codex, Gemini, or any ACP-compatible agent. Bring your own token.
- **[Skillsets](/skillsets/)** *(open source)* — install packaged agent
  configurations from an open registry; one skillset is translated to every
  agent's on-disk format.

The managed product and the open-source core are the same idea at two altitudes:
the product runs it for you; the open source lets you run it yourself.

## Get started

- New here? Follow the **[Quickstart](/start/quickstart/)**.
- Want the mental model first? Read **[Core concepts](/start/concepts/)**.

## Can't find what you're looking for?

Each product has its own overview and reference. If something is missing or
unclear, that is a documentation bug — see the **[FAQ](/resources/faq/)** or the
[GitHub org](https://github.com/tilework-tech).