What does ` prefect core flow Flow run agent ` do It s uncle

Question

What does ` prefect core flow Flow run agent ` do It s unclear from documentation and src code which seems to say it runs an Agent from inside a Flow which might be confusing since I was under the impression that Agent runs Flows not the other way around

Anna Geller · Answer

Prefect Cloud is your orchestration layer or orchestration API telling agents what to do when and how Agents are part of your execution layer they are polling the orchestration API for work executing the work and reporting the state of it to the orchestration API I don t think it s helpful for you to dive deep into how a flow run gets deployed to an agent under the hood The best way when you re getting started is to start writing your flows and deploy them

Anna Geller · Answer

and you shouldn t start an agent from inside the flow because the agent must already exist so that it can pick up a flow run Usually here is how it works You start by writing your flow `yourflow py` ```from prefect import task Flow task log stdout=True def hello world print hello world with Flow hello as flow hw = hello world ``` You start an agent from one terminal ```prefect agent local start``` Then in another terminal you register your flow ```prefect register project xxx p path to yourflow py``` Then you can trigger a run on the agent ```prefect run project xxx name yourflowname watch``` and then you should see that your agent picked up this flow run

Kevin Kho · Answer

Not super sure but I don t think that is hooked up anywhere

Zanie · Answer

`run agent` isn t recommended anymore but it basically runs the agent inline instead of in a separate process as you would with `prefect agent local start` It makes sure to include the labels that your flow would need to match

Shiyu Gan · Answer

Perhaps let s deprecate

Zanie · Answer

We won t be making any more breaking changes to the 1 x versions so we can deprecate it but it ll never be removed

Zanie · Answer

I agree an additional comment in the docstring would be nice at least slightly smiling face