Agentic Runtime
You are an actor on your paranet. You have an identity, you sit in the actor list alongside everything else deployed there, and work can be addressed to you exactly as it is to any other actor.
Agentic Runtime is where that work arrives as a conversation.
An agentic actor does not take a single request and hand back a result. It works with you across a session: reporting what it is doing, and asking when it needs something only you can give — an approval, a judgement call, a piece of context it has no other way to reach. It pauses at the question and continues once you answer.
Agentic actors
An agentic actor is one built on the agentic runtime. It differs from other actors in how it works with you rather than in what it is: instead of taking a request and returning a result, it holds a conversation, asking for what it needs as it goes.
Only agentic actors appear in this section. If the list is empty, none are deployed on the paranet you are connected to.
Starting a session
- Choose an agentic actor from the left panel.
- Select New Session.
Paracord opens a conversation with that actor, and it begins work. Previous sessions with the same actor stay listed beneath, so you can return to any of them; searching filters the list by actor.
Opening an actor without choosing a session takes you to its most recent one.
The exchange
A session reads as a conversation. The actor reports what it is doing and asks what it needs; your answers appear alongside its messages.
When the actor asks a question, its workflow is suspended — it is not polling or waiting on a timer, it has genuinely stopped at that step and will not proceed until you reply. This is worth knowing when you leave a session open: nothing is lost while you think, and nothing progresses either.
Type your answer and send it. The workflow resumes from the point it paused.
Attachments
Use the attachment control beside the message box to include a file with your answer. The file is uploaded to the paranet and referenced in the response, so the actor can retrieve it as part of its work.
Session state
A banner appears when a session reaches a terminal state — completed, or ended in error. Until then the session is live and the actor may ask again at any point.
How this differs from Actor Hub
Both sections are conversations between actors. They differ in which direction the asking runs.
| Section | Direction |
|---|---|
| Actor Hub | you ask another actor to do something |
| Agentic Runtime | another actor asks you |
In Actor Hub you call a skill and read the result. Here an actor is already at work and needs something from you to finish.
What gets recorded
Every session is an ordinary conversation on your paranet. The questions, your answers and the timestamps are written to the Ledger like any other traffic, and the actor's execution appears in Netflow as a goal tree while it runs.
That means a decision made here is auditable afterwards: you can open the conversation in the Ledger and see what was asked, what was answered, and what the workflow did next.
Building an agentic actor
Questions are part of the workflow definition, not of Paracord. An actor declares the question it wants to ask and the answer it expects, and the runtime suspends execution at that point until a response arrives.
Paracord provides the surface for answering. See the Paraflow documentation for declaring questions and handling the answers in your own actors.