Application Stack

AutoGen core is designed to be an unopinionated framework that can be used to build a wide variety of multi-agent applications. It is not tied to any specific agent abstraction or multi-agent pattern.

The following diagram shows the application stack.

At the bottom of the stack is the base messaging and routing facilities that enable agents to communicate with each other. These are managed by the agent runtime, and for most applications, developers only need to interact with the high-level APIs provided by the runtime (see Agent and Agent Runtime).

At the top of the stack, developers need to define the types of the messages that agents exchange. This set of message types forms a behavior contract that agents must adhere to, and the implementation of the contracts determines how agents handle messages. The behavior contract is also sometimes referred to as the message protocol. It is the developer’s responsibility to implement the behavior contract. Multi-agent patterns emerge from these behavior contracts (see Multi-Agent Design Patterns).

An Example Application

Consider a concrete example of a multi-agent application for code generation. The application consists of three agents: Coder Agent, Executor Agent, and Reviewer Agent. The following diagram shows the data flow between the agents, and the message types exchanged between them.

In this example, the behavior contract consists of the following:

• CodingTaskMsg message from application to the Coder Agent

• CodeGenMsg from Coder Agent to Executor Agent

• ExecutionResultMsg from Executor Agent to Reviewer Agent

• ReviewMsg from Reviewer Agent to Coder Agent

• CodingResultMsg from the Reviewer Agent to the application

The behavior contract is implemented by the agents’ handling of these messages. For example, the Reviewer Agent listens for ExecutionResultMsg and evaluates the code execution result to decide whether to approve or reject, if approved, it sends a CodingResultMsg to the application, otherwise, it sends a ReviewMsg to the Coder Agent for another round of code generation.

This behavior contract is a case of a multi-agent pattern called reflection, where a generation result is reviewed by another round of generation, to improve the overall quality.