Own Your Agents · 02.04
Agent Commissioning: Provisioning an Identity
The mechanics behind bootstrap and spawn: how a durable agent identity gets bound to a runtime adapter and a credential vault.
commissionAgent: one function, every entry point
Whether an agent is created by agentis bootstrap, by an operator spawning a specialist from the dashboard, or by the import pipeline creating a new agent for a discovered harness, every path converges on the same function: commissionAgent. That convergence is deliberate — one place enforces every identity invariant, instead of three code paths that could each forget one.
Invariants enforced at commission time
| Invariant | What it prevents |
|---|---|
| Single orchestrator per workspace | Commissioning a second orchestrator-role agent in a workspace that already has one is rejected outright. |
Valid reportsTo target | An agent can't be commissioned reporting to an id that doesn't resolve to a real agent in the same workspace. |
| Harness config repair | The adapter's config is run through repairCliHarnessConfig before it's stored, catching malformed CLI config at creation time instead of at first dispatch. |
| Honest initial status | A commissioned agent lands offline or paused — never a false "ready" before its runtime has actually been registered. |
What gets wired at birth
Beyond the bare identity row, commissioning optionally wires an agent into two more systems when they're configured: the MCP harness, so a CLI runtime like Codex or Claude Code calls Agentis platform tools natively in one invocation instead of a marker-based re-spawn; and the skill materializer, which writes the agent's Brain skill atoms out to .claude/skills/ in its harness working directory so the CLI loads them the same way it loads any other native skill.
A managed per-agent home directory is used as the working directory by default when no explicit project path is given — so a freshly commissioned agent has somewhere real to work from immediately, without an operator needing to hand-provision a folder first.
Continue
The seam that lets you move an agent from one model runtime to another without losing a single memory, skill, or habit it earned.
Embedded SQLite, a bundled offline embedding model, and a content-addressed local asset store — how Agentis runs complete on your own machine.