The provider agent

The provider agent (usepod-agent) is a small standalone binary that connects your inference hardware to the Use Pod coordinator. It is open source so operators can audit exactly what they run.

Supported backends

The agent discovers and dispatches to local OpenAI-compatible backends:

Backend	Default port
vLLM	8000
llama.cpp server	8080
LM Studio	1234
Ollama	11434

Lifecycle

1. Identity. On first run the agent generates an Ed25519 keypair, persisted locally with 0600 permissions. This key is your provider identity.
2. Connect. The agent dials an outbound WebSocket to the coordinator (wss://api.usepod.ai/provider/connect). No inbound ports are required.
3. Authenticate. A signed challenge/response binds the connection to your provider record (enrolling on first connect via the enrollment code).
4. Advertise. The agent sends a capabilities message — your models, prices, max concurrency, and backend kind — which the coordinator records and marks you online.
5. Serve. The coordinator dispatches jobs; the agent calls your local backend and streams the response bytes back. Heartbeats keep your health and metrics fresh.

Reconnection

If the connection drops — for example during a coordinator deploy — the agent reconnects automatically with backoff and re-advertises its capabilities. A clean coordinator shutdown sends a close frame so the agent treats it as a planned cycle rather than an outage.

Keeping current

Existing hosts do not update automatically. To upgrade:

usepod-agent upgrade
sudo systemctl restart usepod-agent   # or restart your process manager
usepod-agent version