CAR — Common Agent Runtime
A home for your AI agents. On your machine.
The supervised runtime where agents live, restart, and prove their work.
CAR is a program you install on your own computer that runs AI agents and looks after them: it keeps them alive in the background, restarts them when they crash, and stops to ask your permission before anything risky — it can even text you for the OK.
What is CAR
A runtime that never takes the AI’s word for it.
CAR is a program you install on your own computer that runs AI agents and looks after them: it keeps them alive in the background, restarts them when they crash, and stops to ask your permission before anything risky — it can even text you for the OK.
Its signature habit is proof: for coding jobs and goal runs it writes down up front what done must look like as real checks, then re-runs those checks itself and refuses to say finished until they actually pass — it never just takes the AI’s word for it.
The thinking can come from cloud models, local models, or agents like Claude Code; either way the work, the rules, and the receipts stay on your machine. We run our own fleet of agents on it every day — it’s the harness we trust them with.
Proof-of-done
The runtime re-runs real checks. Exit codes decide done — never the model’s self-report. The AI doesn’t get to grade its own work.
A supervised home
Agents persist in the background, auto-restart on crash, and stop to ask permission before anything risky — even by text message.
Pluggable brains, owned harness
Cloud models, local models, or agents like Claude Code do the thinking. The work, the rules, and the receipts stay on your machine.
How it works
Four steps from install to proven work.
Install CAR
One installer puts the runtime and the car CLI on your machine. Sign in with your Parslee account to use the built-in assistant; local models are optional.
Start an agent
Agents run under supervision: they persist in the background and restart automatically when they crash.
Risky ops ask first
Anything risky routes through approval before it happens — CAR can even text you for the OK.
Checks decide done
Done is written down as real checks up front, and CAR re-runs them itself before it will say finished.
The thinking is rented from clouds and chat windows; the work itself — the files it changes, the rules it must obey, the evidence that it did what it claims — deserves to live somewhere you own.
Install
Get CAR on your machine.
Windows
Run the installer, or use Scoop.
Download .exescoop bucket add car https://github.com/Parslee-ai/scoop-car
scoop install car
Developers
Embed the runtime in your own projects.
npm install car-runtime
pip install car-runtime
Build on it
Embed the runtime, or drive it from any language.
Spec · Guide · Agent IR · JSON-RPC index · Python API · Node API
Drive it
The CLI, the assistant, and wiring CAR into your coding agent.
Reading this as an AI?
Start here — a machine-readable index of everything below.
llms.txt · llms-full.txt (~244K tokens — check your budget)
CAR binaries are free to use and redistribute, including commercially, but not to modify — see LICENSE-BINARIES. This repository's contents (docs, examples, scripts) are Apache-2.0; CAR's source is not published under an open license.