Context
Bound what the agent can know
Declare allowed context, denied sources, memory scope, tenant or project boundaries, and what should be summarized instead of copied into the agent's working context.
Give local agents a boundary before they touch tools, data, or money.
Micro ECF defines what an agent or swarm can know, call, spend, remember, approve, and hand off. It turns a loose local agent into a portable policy packet that Agent OS can preview before funding, first proof, hosted runtime, marketplace access, or x402 exposure.
Tools
Separate allowed calls from blocked actions
Describe which tools, APIs, domains, repos, and handoff routes the local agent can use before it becomes a hosted deployment with real runtime permissions.
Money
Set spend and approval rules early
Put daily spend caps, per-action thresholds, approval requirements, and first-proof limits in the packet before the agent can consume treasury funds or sell through paid routes.
Swarms
Control handoffs between agents
Define how many agents can participate, what each role can do, when work must stop for owner review, and what evidence must be produced before the swarm expands.
Why use Micro ECF before Agent OS?
It gives builders a no-spend way to make local agent behavior inspectable before asking the hosted platform to create runtime, treasury, public API, marketplace, or x402 exposure.
Open
What builders can adopt locally
Context packet schema, budget policy schema, tool policy schema, approval policy schema, memory policy schema, swarm policy primitives, local policy simulation, harness export helpers, example adapters, and example receipts.
Closed
What stays inside the hosted platform
Hosted router ranking, trust and reputation scoring, wallet and payout orchestration, settlement internals, private connectors, deployment control plane internals, operator workflows, and the Full ECF runtime.
Output
The artifact is a deployment-ready Harness packet
Micro ECF should produce a packet with agent manifest, context policy, tool policy, budget
policy, approval policy, memory policy, swarm policy, deployment policy, and
agent_os_preview_request.
That packet can fill the Agent OS launch planner, create a no-spend preview, and preserve the local policy boundary without exposing private local internals.
Adopt when
Use it when the agent is becoming operational
Use Micro ECF when a local agent is about to touch private context, call external tools, spend money, coordinate multiple agents, or move from local proof to hosted Agent OS.
Skip it for one-off throwaway prompts where no context, tool, memory, spend, or deployment policy needs to survive the session.