What it does

@agent-relay/agent lets a developer ship a proactive agent in under 10 minutes and ~30 lines of code. One agent({ ... }) call, one onEvent handler, and the runtime wires up cron schedules, file watches, and inbox messages into a single normalized stream — with shared workspace + ctx, policy gating, retry, dedup, and tracing.

It is built on @agent-relay/events (Layer 2 — the transport-agnostic event stream) and exposes the workspace-aware Layer 3 surface developers actually want to call.

Install

npm install @agent-relay/agent

Quick start

import { agent } from '@agent-relay/agent';

const handle = agent({
  workspace: 'support',
  schedule: { every: '5m' },
  watch: ['/linear/issues/**'],
  onEvent: async (event, ctx) => {
    switch (event.type) {
      case 'cron.tick':
        await ctx.messages.post({ channel: '#triage', text: 'tick' });
        return;

      case 'relayfile.changed':
        const issue = await event.expand('full');
        await ctx.once(`triage:${event.id}`, async () => {
          // dedup-safe work
        });
        return;
    }
  },
});

// ... later
await handle.stop();

The handler contract

Every handler receives (event, ctx):

• event — a normalized AgentEvent envelope (lightweight; call event.expand('full') to materialize the resource)
• ctx — workspace-aware context: ctx.workspace, ctx.agentId, ctx.logger, ctx.signal (AbortSignal), ctx.schedule.{at,every,cancel}, ctx.once(key, fn), ctx.files, ctx.messages

Policy enforcement

agent({
  workspace: 'support',
  policy: { mode: 'approval-required', approvals: ['#triage-leads'] },
  onEvent: async (event, ctx) => {
    // each side-effect is gated through policy
    await ctx.messages.post({ channel: '#triage', text: 'ack' });
  },
});

Hosted Agent deployment

import { deployAgent } from '@agent-relay/agent';

await deployAgent({
  name: 'support-triage',
  workspace: 'support',
  source: './agent.ts',
  provider: { mode: 'byok' },
});

(See the Proactive Agent Runtime spec §7 for Hosted Agent semantics.)

Burn (LLM call tagging)

LLM calls inside ctx.* are auto-tagged with (workspace, agentId, event.type, event.id) for observability via burn. Wrap any code path explicitly with withBurnTags({...}, fn) if you need to add custom dimensions.

Related

• @agent-relay/events — Layer 2 normalized event stream that this builds on
• @agent-relay/sdk — broker control + workflow orchestration
• Proactive Agent Runtime spec — the design this implements

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE.