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Runtimes and connections

A graph defines the work and its control flow; the runtime plan supplies execution details for each executable node. Since the two documents are separate, local, self-hosted, and managed targets can run the same graph.

Four explicit choices

Each agent binding names:

  1. a harness, codex or claude;
  2. a provider supported by that harness;
  3. an opaque provider-owned model identifier;
  4. zero or more named connections, each declaring exact environment field names.

Zeroshot accepts these harness/provider pairs:

Harness Providers
codex openai, openrouter, bedrock
claude anthropic, openrouter, bedrock

Admission rejects the two known-incompatible pairs, codex with anthropic and claude with openai. Zeroshot does not check current provider availability, and model names remain provider-owned.

Uniform and exact plans

--uniform-runtime-config expands one agent binding across all executable nodes, which keeps a built-in template configuration short:

{
  "harness": "claude",
  "provider": "anthropic",
  "model": "PROVIDER_MODEL_ID",
  "size": "medium",
  "effort": "high",
  "sessionScope": "execution"
}

--runtime-config accepts a full plan with one same-named binding per executable graph node. Use it when reviewers and workers need different models, effort, sessions, or connections. Inspect node names first with zeroshot template show TEMPLATE.

Session scope is either execution or node_instance. An execution scope opens a fresh provider session for each execution; node_instance reuses a live session when the same graph node instance runs again, such as across loop iterations.

Runtime configuration contains names, not secret values

A connection maps a stable key to required environment field names:

{
  "connections": {
    "openrouter": ["OPENROUTER_API_KEY"]
  }
}

The submission environment or a target-owned connection store supplies the values. Zeroshot keeps them out of the graph, runtime JSON, run ledger, and observation records.

The uniform runtime defaults are:

Provider Connection key Fields
openai openai OPENAI_API_KEY
openrouter openrouter OPENROUTER_API_KEY
anthropic anthropic ANTHROPIC_API_KEY
bedrock bedrock AWS_BEARER_TOKEN_BEDROCK, AWS_REGION

Store a local static connection by prompting for its fields:

zeroshot connection set openrouter --field OPENROUTER_API_KEY
zeroshot connection list

connection set replaces the whole value for that key, so repeat every required --field when updating a multi-field connection. connection list reports names and kind but never values.

Hosted targets can also own user- or organization-scoped connections. Setup and dynamic connection kinds depend on the target; Zeroshot consumes only the resolved fields declared by the runtime.