Concepts

GDK gives you components for building an agent, rather than one fixed agent with a set of configuration options. Your application decides what work is allowed, how state is stored, which models to use, and how the agent interacts with the outside world.

The execution model is a state machine composed from operations. An operation can run a tool, add context, enforce a limit, or pause for input. Inference is a specialized step that reaches a model through a provider. The machine applies the resulting effects through your runtime, then loads the updated session before deciding what to do next.

Start here

• State machine: how the execution cycle works, what yielding means, and how persistence makes resuming possible.
• Operations: the units you compose into that machine, a worked example, the operations available today, and when to write your own.
• Providers: the model interface, built-in and declarative implementations, and the difference between local inference and talking to a local model server.
• Authentication: how a provider gets its credentials, which mechanisms ship with GDK, and how to supply your own.

Read Hello World for a concrete assembly of these pieces. These pages explain the design; the reference links to the full APIs. Examples here follow the GDK APIs in this checkout (0.1.0-alpha.13); Hello World follows the example's pinned alpha.12 release.

If you want an existing agent behind your own interface instead, you can build an app with goose over ACP without assembling the runtime.