What are Surfaces?
Surfaces are deployment channels that expose your Product's capabilities to users. They define how users interact with your AI—through chat, APIs, IDEs, or other interfaces.
How surfaces work
A surface connects a Product to a specific interface. When a user interacts with the surface (sends a chat message, calls an API endpoint, etc.), the surface routes the request to the appropriate capability in your Product.
One Product can have multiple surfaces, each providing a different way to access the same capabilities.
Available Surface types
Runtype provides four surface types:
Chat Surface
Embeddable chat widget for websites and web applications. Users interact with your AI through a familiar chat interface.
Use for: Customer support, sales assistants, documentation help, interactive demos
API Surface
REST API endpoints that accept HTTP requests and return responses. Integrate AI capabilities into any application or service.
Use for: Mobile apps, backend services, third-party integrations, webhooks
MCP Surface
Model Context Protocol server that connects to AI IDEs like Claude Desktop, Cursor, and VS Code. Your capabilities become tools that AI assistants can call.
Use for: Developer tools, code generation, IDE integrations, AI pair programming
A2A Surface (Agent-to-Agent)
Protocol for AI Agents to communicate with each other. External Agents can discover and invoke your capabilities.
Use for: Multi-Agent systems, AI orchestration, cross-platform Agent collaboration
Not sure which surface to start with? Use chat for customer-facing applications or API for programmatic access. You can always add more surfaces later.
Surfaces and capabilities
Every surface exposes all capabilities on its Product (unless you configure scoping). When a user interacts with a surface, how the request is routed depends on the orchestration mode:
Single capability mode — User explicitly chooses which capability to invoke
Orchestrated mode — Product automatically routes to the best capability
See Surface orchestration modes for details.
Next steps
Explore specific surface types:
Or learn about: