Field notes
25 posts tagged Field notes, from the Kortix Blog.
What an agent runtime sells is the time between turns
Agent runtimes are judged by how long their machine lives after the last turn, and open-source Kortix stops its sandbox 15 minutes later.
On premise AI: the open-source grant file decides the boundary
On premise AI keeps the model, the memory and the record of who allowed what on your server. Kortix is open source, so the grant is a file you can diff.
The pi coding agent needs a runtime. Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System for it
The pi coding agent has no permission system. Open-source Kortix gates its tools and, by default, sends work through a change request someone else reviews.
The harness is a component of an open-source AI Operating System
An agent harness is the loop plus the rules that decide what an agent may touch, and an open-source AI Operating System keeps them in a repo you own.
Open-source AI agents for business: the grant list comes first
Kortix is open source, and its manifest decides per job which AI agent calls run unattended, which wait for a person, and which never run.
Autonomous agents run on a number you set on the trigger
You have read a page of definitions of autonomous AI agents this week and none of them helps you compare two products
An open-source MCP connector holds the account the protocol left out
MCP says nothing about whose account a tool call runs as. Kortix is open source and pins each connector call to a named account under a rule in your repo.
The refund is where an open-source support agent stops
A support agent may read the thread, search the codebase for the bug, check the customer's invoices and send the reply without asking anyone
An installed skill is a dependency. Open source is how you pin it.
A skill copied from another repository is a dependency nobody versioned. Open-source Kortix pins each skill to a hash and a grant in a repo you own.
An agentic workflow ends at a change request, not a transcript
An agentic workflow ends somewhere a person can refuse it: open-source Kortix runs each one on its own machine and lands the work as a change request.
An AI agent for HR has to read the policy library your team wrote
HR agents in the big suites answer from their own product's data, while an open-source agent reads your policy library and drafts the reply.
AI marketing agents need a claims file with a read date
Your marketing agent will send a sentence with a price in it, and someone above you will ask how anyone knows the price was right
An open-source AI Operating System should keep a sales agent's queue small
Every demo of an AI sales agent sells you the reply. It lands in seconds, in a voice close to your team's, and the only decision left is whether to press send
An open-source cloud agent hands back a branch your team can refuse
A cloud agent is an agent that runs on a machine you did not hand it, and comes back with work
An open-source agentic operating system is one whose permissions you can read
Most definitions of an agentic operating system stop at coordination, while an open-source one puts permission in a grant file you can read.
Agents in Slack: what an open-source install leaves undecided
An open-source agent answers in a Slack thread in an afternoon. What it may touch without a person sits in a separate file most teams never review.
What ChatGPT Work's control page admits, and what an open-source stack must prove
Every ChatGPT Work control rests on a sentence OpenAI wrote. All ten are quoted with their URLs, beside what open-source Kortix answers and concedes.
ChatGPT Work keeps the controls; the open-source alternative keeps the record
ChatGPT Work gives admins real controls. Who changed an agent's access is the open question. Open-source Kortix keeps that record in a git repo you own.
Self-hosted open-source AI agents: four checks decide the install
Self-hosting open-source AI agents comes down to four operational checks: where sessions run, who can sign up, what you back up, and the monthly bill.
ChatGPT Business pricing: a published seat, a bill open source can price
ChatGPT Business prices seats and leaves the credit rate unpublished; open-source Kortix bills agent compute per second, so a month is known in advance.
Microsoft Copilot pricing: the credit meter, and the open-source alternative
Microsoft Copilot costs $30 a seat, but the Copilot Studio credit meter decides an agent team's bill; this is that arithmetic, and the open-source alternative.
Self-hosted Claude Cowork does not exist. Here is the open-source answer
Anthropic runs Claude Cowork on its own servers; see what an open-source self-hosted alternative must carry, and the commands that stand one up.
GPT-6 Astra widens what agent teams delegate. Open-source Kortix holds the review gate.
GPT-6 Astra lets agent teams delegate more work, but verification lands on you. Kortix is open source and built to run that work.
What the OpenAI Agents API changes for teams on an open-source platform
The OpenAI Agents API is in public beta, and it changes who runs the harness. What teams gain, what stays the same, and where open-source Kortix fits.
How to build reliable AI agent workflows with open-source Kortix
Map AI agent workflow failure modes to concrete controls, with a reference implementation on open-source Kortix.