Introduction

nvoken is an agent runtime deployed as a service. It is built to be used by your application — often a multi-tenant SaaS — as its agentic backend: your app calls nvoken, and nvoken does the agent work behind a delightful experience for your users.

Model providers ship one stateless generation call. nvoken is the layer above the LLM API and below your application: the turn that runs the model against tools until the work is done, the Session that gives the agent memory and identity, and the durability, routing, and observability a production agent needs. These are the harness features every agentic product otherwise builds itself — nvoken supplies them so you can focus on your app.

The primary operation

invoke(spec, input, session?, tenant?) -> durable invocation

No provisioning first. Your application sends the agent specification with the request: instructions, model preferences, tool schemas, output contract, limits. nvoken resolves or creates the Session, runs the turn durably, and streams output and tool calls back.

An agent turn may take seconds or tens of minutes, progressing through many rounds of tool calls. Durable admission means an API disconnect, process loss, or deploy cannot erase accepted work. If an execution owner is lost, the same Invocation is requeued and a replacement continues from its last committed checkpoint.

What nvoken is not

nvoken stores execution state, not product configuration. It owns the Sessions and the execution state of running turns; your application remains the source of truth for agent definitions and their versions, users and tenants, integrations and credentials, orchestration, and product data. Agent behavior arrives with each request as the execution spec — nothing is provisioned or registered first.

Every tool with side effects executes on your side of the boundary, either as a recoverable host tool call or as a signed callback to your endpoints.

Where to go next

• Run nvoken locally — the shortest path to seeing a full agent turn run against your own provider key.
• The contract — the durable invoke API and how clients recover authoritative state.
• Your app owns the state — the boundary that makes nvoken fit a multi-tenant app.
• The harness — the full catalog of what nvoken covers, layer by layer.

nvoken is Apache-2.0, bring-your-own-key, and self-hostable. A complete installation is one binary plus Postgres.