Apache Burr: Build reliable AI agents and applications(burr.apache.org) |
Apache Burr: Build reliable AI agents and applications(burr.apache.org) |
BUT, if you boil it down, an agent really is context building, making an LLM call, executing requested tool calls, parsing the final model output, returning it to some frontend. There's extensions like memory, async tool calls, etc, but not THAT complicated from a traditional software engineering perspective.
Everyone seems to want to build their agent framework. But if you're tasked with building an agent, I've found it much easier and more maintainable to just build 1:1 code for THAT agent: most of the abstractions you get from an agent framework purely get in the way and obfuscate core agent logic.
You end up being forced to use the abstractions chosen by the agent framework, which sometimes are a mismatch for what you're actually trying to do.
Don't need to get it all from one vendor, but that feels to me like the toolkit and for most use cases I'd argue: - Don't limit yourself to a single model provider (anthropic, openai, etc) - Own your context - Own your compounding
Where I'm starting to question this is maintainability. When I come up with a new technique or way of doing something in my new agent, how can I update an older agent. Do I want to update the older agent?
But, I get what you're talking about w.r.t. building for the exact problem at hand. For example, I'm guessing that Apache Burr has support for a plugin-able vector RAG system (or at least it will if it doesn't now). That's great, but I want my RAG system to add documents to the context and keep them as part of an updated system prompt with some very specific tweaks that happen as part of that process. This is a bespoke way of working with an existing concept (RAG) that doesn't lend itself to using any specific framework.
In my use-case, bespoke is the way to go. But then I'm still stuck with having to make engineering choices for updating older agents. So, I see your point.
Burr just helps you, the engineer, to really control the primitives. Then adds some cool features you don't have to think about -- like observability :)
And just like when people were trying to figure out which sorting algorithm made the most sense, we are all just trying to figure out which prompt algorithms with which models lead to good results.
4 months of mostly spinning their wheels later they launched a really lackluster OC product that's effectively DOA.
When building an agentic workflow there are enough primitives that rewriting them from scratch every time makes zero sense.
What is a tool? How does the LLM understand the tool? Formatting a native function into a serializable input/output pattern makes sense to generalize and that does not need to exist repeated in everyones application code.
We use libraries to interact with the APIs themselves; nobody would say writing a spec-compliant API client was poor practice. Agentic harnesses are just one layer above: I need to call the API and I need to do it with certain expected conventions.
the hard part about building agents isnt the framework it's discovery, context, traditional engineering, handling the last mile
there are some invariants like the loop, tools, observability, guardrails, monitors etc...
The better pitch would be, "this is how easy observability, guardrails, monitoring, deployment, evals, versioning, A/B testing are with our framework." What the agent code looks like is somewhat incidental.
you dont need a framework
Then you have a general workflow that has a set of skills (prompts) and tools. And that could be recursive.
So if you do something like "rename this file" you have to build up a workflow like:
[classifier]
what's the workflow -> rename
[rename workflow]
list files (tool call)
figure out relevant predicate (LLM)
convert predicate into a filter query give the context of the files (LLM)
figure out what you want the new name to be (LLM)
create the request body and hit the tool
approval workflow
formatting
It's a lot to manage and orchestrate and that's just one simple example. You'd like want to use the same building blocks to delete a file or move it. Even to know the right concepts is difficult as we're a bit deluded on whats going on in the background of these modern AI apps like Claude and GPT that do a lot of this stuff for you
Obviously, you could have a different LLM like a "angel" that prunes a primary agent of the context it doesn't need, but I think the realistic KV cache problem is will determine the optimal structure: you want the work do be done in the most efficience KV cache (context-reuse) as much as possible.
There's definitely more to it than just spawning agents.
Ideally self-hostable/open source
I know claude code has a lot of that internally built in already, but it’s claude-only
I’ve been playing with this stack and left wondering if Strands provides any secret sauce with Agent Core. So far it doesn’t feel that way and sometimes they even feel at odds with each other.
Yes, Python has decorators, but they're best used as "filters" that apply to functions or methods. Cache this, serialize the output of this function always, prepare this function to be used as a tool by an agentic harness. Not registration, not flow control. You may disagree but someone has to say it; FastAPI influenced the modern use of decorators far too much in the wrong direction.
Builder patterns are a Rust convention, because Rust has no named keyword arguments. A Python function already exposes a named contract. There is very little reason to ever to sequentially pass configuration parameters in chained method calls. If you need to add state that doesn't exist yet to a constructor or factory, that is not a builder pattern. That is registration. The one place where builder patterns should be tolerated is query builders. They iteratively build on a concept and having the additional "slot" for metadata (method name plus keyword arguments) is genuinely useful. Using methods which accept single parameter instead of keyword arguments is incorrect.
It might sounded that I’m against the move, but I’m just curious as what apache found in the platform to get incubated
I searched the docs for authentication and mcp (one of the protocols which, among other things, handles some pieces of authentication/authorization) but didn't see any results.
What did I miss?
reddit user testimonial
framework is for state machines
why man..
Anyone have something they genuinely like for all of this? For now I'm rolling my own, but I can't believe I won't find a better OSS alternative soon...
Observability is, for my purposes, solved by a given framework supporting OpenTelemetry.
Guardrails is where I've gotten the most value of openshell being a neat package. Agent workload scope is written as policy in openshell, and capability is backed by openshell handling all execution.
Monitoring/deployment/versioning is helped as well, depending on how agents/runners are slotted into the system. Deployment namely is quite well supported- openshell has kube/helm bits that are experimental atm, but seem like a logical approach imho.
Evals and a/b testing isnt something ive explored in depth, considering that agents with composable tool sets + frontier models are beyond my expectations already.