exoclaw-turn

Run a single exoclaw agent turn as a library call — no bus, no channels, no persistence.

pip install exoclaw-turn

Why

Most of exoclaw is built around the bus-driven multi-turn model: messages come in on a channel, the agent loop processes them, replies go back out. That shape is right for bots and assistants, but overkill when you just want to call an agent like a function — get one bounded run, with tool dispatch, and a return value.

run_turn is that front door. It spins up an ephemeral AgentLoop with a throwaway MessageBus and an in-memory conversation, drives a single turn to completion, and returns the result. Everything the agent loop already does — compaction on context overflow, loop detection, plugin context collection, subagent chain tracking, tool dispatch — carries over unchanged.

Usage

from exoclaw_turn import run_turn
from exoclaw_provider_litellm.provider import LiteLLMProvider
from exoclaw_openrouter_search.tool import OpenRouterSearchTool

provider = LiteLLMProvider(default_model="claude-sonnet-4-6")

result = await run_turn(
    provider=provider,
    system="You are a research assistant. Be terse.",
    message="What's the population of Reykjavik?",
    tools=[OpenRouterSearchTool()],
)

print(result.text)           # final assistant reply
print(result.tool_calls)     # tools the model invoked, in order
print(result.messages)       # all new messages produced this turn

Anything implementing the exoclaw.agent.tools.protocol.Tool protocol works as a tool — every tool plugin in the exoclaw-plugins catalog drops in unchanged.

What it inherits from AgentLoop

run_turn owns no agent behaviour of its own. It assembles the loop and reshapes the result. That means whatever lives in AgentLoop today is available through this front door:

• Context-window compaction. Long tool chains that overflow the model's context window trigger Conversation.recover_from_overflow if implemented — for the ephemeral conversation it isn't, so the original ContextWindowExceededError surfaces. Pass a longer-lived conversation if you need recovery.
• Loop detection. Pass iteration_policy=... (e.g. from exoclaw-loop-detection) to terminate based on tool-call patterns instead of a hard count.
• Tool dispatch. Tools execute through the same ToolRegistry the bus-driven path uses.
• Subagent chain tracking. If you call run_turn from inside another turn, the trace contextvars (turn.id, turn.parent_id, turn.chain) extend the parent's ancestry — same logging hierarchy as exoclaw-subagent.

Parameters

What it doesn't do

• No persistence. State is dropped at end of turn. For multi-turn conversations, use the bus-driven AgentLoop directly, or build on top of exoclaw-conversation.
• No streaming result. The function awaits the full turn before returning. Use on_progress for incremental feedback if you need it.
• No multimodal attachments. The ephemeral conversation doesn't encode media into the user message content. For image/file inputs, use a bus-driven AgentLoop with a real Conversation implementation.
• No channel. This is library-shaped. For an interactive REPL, use exoclaw-channel-cli.