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Show HN: Orloj – agent infrastructure as code (YAML and GitOps)

https://github.com/OrlojHQ/orloj

Hey HN, we're Jon and Kristiane, and we're building Orloj (https://orloj.dev), an open-source (Apache 2.0) orchestration runtime for multi-agent AI systems. You define agents, tools, policies, and workflows in declarative YAML manifests, and Orloj handles scheduling, execution, governance, and reliability.

We built this because running AI agents in production today looks a lot like running containers before Kubernetes: ad-hoc scripts, no governance, no observability, no standard way to manage the lifecycle of an agent fleet. Everyone we talked to was writing the same messy glue code to wire agents together, and nobody had a good answer for "which agent called which tool, and was it supposed to?"

Orloj treats agents the way infrastructure-as-code treats cloud resources. You write a manifest that declares an agent's model, tools, permissions, and execution limits. You compose agents into directed graphs — pipelines, hierarchies, or swarm loops.

The part we're most excited about is governance. AgentPolicy, AgentRole, and ToolPermission are evaluated inline during execution, before every agent turn and tool call. Instead of prompt instructions that the model might ignore, these policies are a runtime gate. Unauthorized actions fail closed with structured errors and full audit trails. You can set token budgets per run, whitelist models, block specific tools, and scope policies to individual agent systems.

For reliability, we built lease-based task ownership (so crashed workers don't leave orphan tasks), capped exponential retry with jitter, idempotent replay, and dead-letter handling. The scheduler supports cron triggers and webhook-driven task creation.

The architecture is a server/worker split. orlojd hosts the API, resource store (in-memory for dev, Postgres for production), and task scheduler. orlojworker instances claim and execute tasks, route model requests through a gateway (OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, etc.), and run tools in configurable isolation — direct, sandboxed, container, or WASM. For local development, you can run everything in a single process with orlojd --embedded-worker --storage-backend=memory.

Tool isolation was important to us. A web search tool probably doesn't need sandboxing, but a code execution tool should run in a container with no network, a read-only filesystem, and a memory cap. You configure this per tool based on risk level, and the runtime enforces it.

We also added native MCP support. You register an MCP server (stdio or HTTP), Orloj auto-discovers its tools, and they become first-class resources with governance applied. So you can connect something like the GitHub MCP server and still have policy enforcement over what agents are allowed to do with it.

Three starter blueprints are included (pipeline, hierarchical, swarm-loop).

Docs: https://docs.orloj.dev

We're also building out starter templates for operational workflows where governance really matters. First on the roadmap: 1. Incident response triage, 2. Compliance evidence collector, 3. CVE investigation pipeline, and 4. Secret rotation auditor. We have 20 templates in mind and community contributions are welcome.

We're a small team and this is v0.1.0, so there's a lot still on the roadmap — hosted cloud, compliance packaging, and more. But the full runtime is open source today and we'd love feedback on what we've built so far. What would you use this for? What's missing?

( 12 comments | on HN )
Re:Show HN: Orloj – agent infrastructure as code (YAML and G... by inglor_cz on Thursday March 26, 2026 @02:34PM (#47534049)
Orloj, btw, is Czech for "Astronomical Clock".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_astronomical_clock

And it comes from mutated Latin word "Horologium".

Re:Show HN: Orloj – agent infrastructure as code (YAML and G... by An0n_Jon on Thursday March 26, 2026 @03:01PM (#47534314)
Yes! We visited The Prague Orloj 2 years ago and it's amazing engineering. That's why we named it after it, for how it's coordinating and orchestrating so many complex mechanisms. (for anyone wondering it's pronounced Or-Loy)
Re:Show HN: Orloj – agent infrastructure as code (YAML and G... by hackyhacky on Thursday March 26, 2026 @03:33PM (#47534660)
You should check out the Olomouc orloj [1]. Equally technically interesting as the Prague one, but with the added "benefit" of having been adjusted for political correctness under the Communist regime.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olomouc_astronomical_clock

Re:Show HN: Orloj – agent infrastructure as code (YAML and G... by An0n_Jon on Thursday March 26, 2026 @04:12PM (#47535119)
Didn't realize the Czechs had so many...The story about the clockmaker on the Prague one was interesting. The king trying to blind him so he could never make another for anyone else...
Re:Show HN: Orloj – agent infrastructure as code (YAML and G... by graphememes on Thursday March 26, 2026 @03:01PM (#47534309)
Feels like I would be taking on a lot of debt and maintainability I may not need
Re:Show HN: Orloj – agent infrastructure as code (YAML and G... by An0n_Jon on Thursday March 26, 2026 @03:08PM (#47534384)
It depends on what you're trying to build to be honest. For simple tasks Orloj can be a little overkill but it really starts shining when you are trying to setup large task flows that need many agents/tools/policies. Working with Terraform/Kubernettes for years gave a lot of the inspiration for the gitops side of things which we think fits naturally with how agent systems work.
Re:Show HN: Orloj – agent infrastructure as code (YAML and G... by ColinEberhardt on Thursday March 26, 2026 @03:52PM (#47534885)
Looks interesting. Quick question - one of the biggest challenges with agentic systems in non-deterministic behaviour. Does this framework do anything to address this? Does it help test and validate agent behaviour?
Re:Show HN: Orloj – agent infrastructure as code (YAML and G... by An0n_Jon on Thursday March 26, 2026 @04:04PM (#47535016)
This is where the governance layer of Orloj fits in. You create policies and attach them to agents/tools which are all governed at runtime. These policies could be token guardrails, tool authority, etc. You can then check all of the traces of a task to have an audit trail for debugging (cli or UI). There are also human in the loop approval features that can be applied to make sure things are working correctly before proceeding on tasks.
Re:Show HN: Orloj – agent infrastructure as code (YAML and G... by jFriedensreich on Thursday March 26, 2026 @04:50PM (#47535538)
Nice design and license, probably some good idea in there somewhere! My main beef with all these projects is the monolith ambition. Every single one of these uncountable projects is trying to solve everything and feels like buying into Kubernetes. Even if open source, thats just too much and too heavy. Postgres, nats, workflow engine what the hell are you building here? Half of this will be obsolete when the next agent architectures come out and then? Solve a few core problems properly and in a modular way dont model agent systems after k8s.
Re:Show HN: Orloj – agent infrastructure as code (YAML and G... by An0n_Jon on Thursday March 26, 2026 @05:06PM (#47535732)
Definitely understand the perspective. I think with all software in general there will be a time where you need to adapt to changing technologies/architectures which is why we open sourced the core so we can have contributors build off it. And k8s is loved/hated but it does solve a lot of problems depending on the circumstance.
Re:Show HN: Orloj – agent infrastructure as code (YAML and G... by shubhamintech on Thursday March 26, 2026 @09:59PM (#47538279)
Runtime policies as an actual gate rather than prompt instructions is the right model. Most frameworks just bolt governance on as a wrapper and hope the model obeys. What I'd want on top of this: observability into why agents are hitting policy blocks, not just that they were blocked.
Re:Show HN: Orloj – agent infrastructure as code (YAML and G... by An0n_Jon on Thursday March 26, 2026 @10:44PM (#47538579)
Yep, totally agree. And Orloj has this built in. Tracks the entire lifecycle of your tasks through traces in real time so you can audit why everything happened good/bad. During your task you can see how many tokens each call used (input/output), and latency for each model/tool call.