---
title: 'How is it different from wiring this myself?'
description: 'Four properties that decide how a Stackbone project is built: a standard wire, a box you own, durability by default, and no publish step.'
position: 2
---

# How is it different from wiring this myself?

> You could assemble an agent, a queue, a Postgres and a secret store yourself.
> What Stackbone changes is four things about how that project is built.

The wire is standard. There is no proprietary session protocol. A request's
`model` field picks which agent answers, on the same
`POST /openai/v1/chat/completions` and `POST /anthropic/v1/messages` every agent
in the workspace shares. Any OpenAI or Anthropic client already works.

You own the box. Stackbone provisions no infrastructure. You run the container
in your own cloud, and Stackbone keeps the record of where it lives: its
address, its signing secret, and the image tag it runs.

Durability comes with the runtime. A `'use step'` function runs once, persists
its result, and retries on failure. Kill the runtime mid-run and it resumes from
the last completed step.

There is no publish step. The image tag is the agent's version, so you deploy a
new image and re-register it. Nothing gets promoted in between.

## Read more

- **[Where do agents actually run?](/docs/faqs/general/where-agents-run)**: the
  box, the control plane and your laptop.
- **[Agent protocol](/docs/cli/protocol/overview)**: the full HTTP
  contract behind the standard wire.
- **[Workflows](/docs/sdk/workflows/overview)**: the execution model that makes
  a run survive a crash.