Omnara launches open-source API for running durable agents
Omnara founder Kartik announced on Show HN an open-source API for running durable agents: you create an agent with an API call and Omnara runs the agent loop, gives the agent sandboxes to run commands in, and handles secrets, permissions and RBAC. According to the founder, each agent's state is stored in Postgres as an append-only event log, so agents survive restarts and cost nothing while idle, and clients can message agents and stream their events over the API. The codebase is open source and self-hostable, including on a single machine with Docker Compose, and Omnara presents it as an open-source alternative to hosted offerings it attributes to Anthropic and OpenAI, namely Claude Managed Agents and the OpenAI Agents API.
Omnara's design keeps the agent log in Postgres and runs each loop iteration on stateless workers that commit results in one transaction, an approach its founder contrasts with harnesses such as Claude Code that keep the loop in one long-lived process with a JSONL or SQLite log.
Hey all, Kartik from Omnara (https://omnara.com) here. We're building an open-source API for running durable agents. You create an agent with an API call, and Omnara runs the agent loop, gives the agent sandboxes to run commands in, and handles secrets, permissions, and RBAC. Each agent's state is stored in Postgres, so agents survive restarts and cost nothing while idle. You can message them and stream their events over the API.
You may remember us from our early days, when we made a remote-control phone app for Claude Code and Codex. Since the harness ran on a laptop back then, we had to build a relay to reach it, it stopped when the laptop closed, and moving it to a cloud sandbox meant syncing code and agent state between machines. We didn't think remote-controlling a local agent was end-game for how people would run agents, so we built a new product where the agent runs in the cloud, any client can talk to it through an API, and it can still use your laptop as one of its machines.
#Omnara#Claude Managed Agents#OpenAI Agents API#Claude Code#Codex#Anthropic#OpenAI#Postgres