AgentForge

An AI-agent framework that behaves like infrastructure, not a demo you ship once. Production plumbing — cost, tracing, memory, guardrails, failover — comes as swap-by-config packages behind version-locked contracts. You write your use case; the framework is already production-grade.

From zero: agentforge new scaffolds a runnable project → the full loop runs offline, no API key (a recorded run) with budget + tracing already wired → swap the vendor or the reasoning loop by editing one line of YAML, agent.py never changes. Runnable example →

AgentForge treats an agent like a system you operate, not a demo you ship once. Four things at its core:

1. Version-locked contracts. ~30 ABCs in a small agentforge-core describe the agent surface, and breaking one is a major version bump (ADR-0007) — so you can build on them like a stable API.
2. Every backend is its own package, swapped by config. LLM provider, memory store, observability stack, reranker, guardrail — each ships as a separate PyPI distribution you plug in and swap by editing one line of YAML, never your agent code.
3. The reasoning loop is swap-by-config too. ReAct, Plan-and-Execute, Tree-of-Thoughts, and a Multi-Agent Supervisor ship behind one Strategy contract — pick the loop in YAML, or compose your own from the ABC. The same agent code runs under any of them; the strategy is a configuration choice, not a rewrite.
4. Scaffolds keep your AI coding assistant on-idiom. Every generated project ships framework-aware instructions for Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Aider, Codex, and Windsurf plus task runbooks — so the AI helping you build stays inside the framework's conventions automatically.

Cost guardrails, OpenTelemetry tracing, vendor failover, PII redaction, and reproducible evals are wired in too — behind those same locked contracts, so you can depend on them in production.

from agentforge import Agent

async with Agent(model="anthropic:claude-sonnet-4-7") as agent:
    result = await agent.run("Summarise this PR in three bullets.")
    print(result.output)

Swap anthropic: for openai:, bedrock:, ollama:, or litellm: — same code, different vendor. Swap the reasoning loop the same way: strategy: react → plan-execute → tree-of-thoughts → supervisor, no code change. Every swap happens behind a locked contract, so it can't quietly change the shape of what your agent gets back.

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Why AgentForge

For developers

The plumbing every production agent needs — cost limits, run-id propagation, distributed tracing, vendor failover, durable state, prompt-injection defenses, PII redaction, hybrid retrieval — is configured, not coded. You focus on what your agent does, not on the harness around it.

For organisations

Audit-ready by default. Every call traces through OpenTelemetry with run_id propagation. Cost guardrails reject runs that exceed their budget before the LLM bill lands. PII redaction happens inside the framework, not in app code. Built-in evaluators turn "did this prompt change regress?" into a reproducible CI gate. SOC 2 / GDPR / ISO 27001 conversations get shorter.

For your AI coding assistant

Every scaffolded agent ships with framework-aware instructions for Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Aider, Codex CLI, and Windsurf — plus 21 task-oriented runbooks. Your AI builds inside the framework's idioms automatically. agentforge upgrade keeps the instructions current as new capabilities ship, so the AI learns the new APIs without you teaching it.

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Quick start

Day 1 — install, scaffold, run:

pip install "agentforge-py[anthropic]"   # or [openai], [bedrock], [ollama], [litellm]
agentforge new my-agent --template minimal
cd my-agent

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-…
agentforge run "Hi"

Six starter templates ship in the wheel: minimal, code-reviewer, patch-bot, docs-qa, triage, research.

Want proof before you install a provider? examples/swap-by-config/ runs the full agent loop offline with no API key (python smoke.py), and shows the same agent.py driving Anthropic or OpenAI with a one-line config change.

Day N — add modules, swap backends, upgrade the framework:

# add a sister module (memory backend, reranker, observability, guard, protocol…)
pip install agentforge-memory-postgres
agentforge add memory-postgres
agentforge config validate

# swap providers / strategies / backends without touching code
agentforge swap llm openai

# upgrade the framework — managed files + runbooks refresh,
# your custom code + `<!-- agentforge:custom -->` blocks survive
agentforge upgrade --to 0.3.0

Every command has a matching docs/runbooks/NN-*.md step-by-step guide that ships in the scaffold — your AI coding assistant follows the relevant runbook automatically when you ask it for "add a reranker" / "configure multi-provider" / "use streaming guardrails".

Want the full developer walkthrough — custom tools, config, growing the agent over time? Jump to Build your own agent.

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What's in the box

AgentForge is a contracts-first framework: ~30 locked ABCs in agentforge-core describe the agent surface; everything else is a plug-in module shipped as its own PyPI package. Pick the modules you need, swap them via config when requirements change.

Pluggable providers

LLMs: Anthropic · OpenAI · AWS Bedrock · Ollama (local) · LiteLLM (100+ underlying providers). Embeddings: OpenAI Matryoshka · Voyage multimodal · Bedrock · Ollama. One string ID (anthropic:claude-sonnet-4-7) selects the model; no provider-specific code paths in your agent.

Reasoning strategies

ReAct · Plan-and-Execute · Tree-of-Thoughts · Multi-Agent Supervisor. Pick the loop in YAML, compose your own from the strategy ABC when you need to.

Persistence + retrieval

One MemoryStore + VectorStore (+ GraphStore) contract, four backends: SQLite · Postgres · Neo4j · SurrealDB. Hybrid retrieval (vector + BM25 over native indexes, RRF fusion), four reranker vendors, GraphRAG expansion for graph backends, schema migrations across all stores via agentforge db migrate.

Guardrails — cost, safety, reliability

Cost. BudgetPolicy checks every LLM, tool, and retriever call against the run's budget — over-budget runs fail fast, before the bill lands. Safety. Input / output / tool-call validator pipelines with four built-in basics + four vendor wrappers — LLM Guard, Microsoft Presidio, NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails, Meta Llama Guard — for PII, prompt injection, toxicity, and off-topic detection. Reliability. Run-id propagation, idempotency_key_for() for side-effecting tools, FallbackChain cross-provider failover.

Observability

JSON-structured logs + OpenTelemetry (with child spans, A2A trace propagation, PII redaction) + Langfuse + Arize Phoenix + Evidently + StatsD. Everything wires in via config; nothing to instrument in your agent code.

Evaluation

Deterministic graders — Coverage, FormatCompliance, RegressionVsBaseline, Consistency — plus six LLM judges (Correctness, Faithfulness, Groundedness, Hallucination, Relevance, Helpfulness). Turn prompt and model upgrades into a CI gate.

Chat + protocols

ChatSession with in-memory / SQLite / Postgres / Redis history, four truncation strategies, sentence-window streaming guardrails (PII redaction over a streamed response), and a Slack adapter. MCP stdio + HTTP/SSE servers. A2A HTTP + streaming + discovery + bearer / mTLS auth.

CLI

agentforge run · eval · debug · db migrate · health · config validate · list / add / remove / swap (module management) · new · upgrade · fork / unfork · status · docs.

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Build your own agent

You don't need to clone this repository. AgentForge ships as PyPI packages — your agent lives in your own project, with the framework as a dependency. Cloning this repo is only for contributing to the framework itself.

1. Install from PyPI

pip install "agentforge-py[anthropic]"   # or [openai], [bedrock], [ollama], [litellm]
# combine extras
pip install "agentforge-py[anthropic,openai,memory-postgres,otel]"
# or install sister packages directly
pip install agentforge-py agentforge-memory-postgres agentforge-langfuse

Every module is its own PyPI distribution. Install only what you use; the framework lazy-imports vendor SDKs so unused providers don't add startup cost.

2. Scaffold your agent project

agentforge new my-agent --template minimal
cd my-agent

Pick from six templates: minimal, code-reviewer, patch-bot, docs-qa, triage, research. You get a complete, runnable project:

my-agent/
├── agentforge.yaml     # model, strategy, budget — the swap-by-config surface
├── pyproject.toml
├── .env.example        # copy to .env, add your API key
├── src/my_agent/
│   └── main.py         # your agent code — start editing here
├── docs/runbooks/      # step-by-step guides your AI assistant follows
├── AGENTS.md           # framework-aware instructions for AI coding
└── CLAUDE.md           # assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, …)

3. Add your API key

cp .env.example .env    # then set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-…

4. Write what your agent does

Edit src/my_agent/main.py. Give the agent your own tools — a typed function plus the @tool decorator is all it takes (the input schema is inferred from the signature and docstring):

from agentforge import Agent, tool

@tool
def lookup_order(order_id: str) -> dict:
    """Fetch an order record from your backend."""
    return orders_db.get(order_id)

async with Agent(tools=[lookup_order]) as agent:
    result = await agent.run("What's the status of order 1042?")
    print(result.output)

Stateful tools subclass the Tool ABC instead. Four defaults ship in agentforge.tools: web_search, calculator, file_read, shell.

5. Configure behaviour in YAML, not code

agentforge.yaml is where the model, reasoning strategy, and guardrails live — your Python never names a vendor:

agent:
  model: "anthropic:claude-sonnet-4-5"
  strategy: "react"        # swap-by-config: plan-execute · tree-of-thoughts · supervisor
  budget:
    usd: 2.0               # over-budget runs fail before the bill lands

Switching providers is agentforge swap llm openai — one config line changes, your agent code doesn't.

6. Run and validate

agentforge run "What's the status of order 1042?"
agentforge config validate

7. Grow it as your needs grow

# durable state, tracing, safety, retrieval — one pip install + one `add` each
pip install agentforge-memory-postgres && agentforge add memory-postgres
pip install agentforge-otel            && agentforge add otel

# framework upgrades refresh managed files; your custom code survives
agentforge upgrade --to 0.3.0

Memory backends, rerankers, guardrail vendors, observability stacks, MCP/A2A protocols, evaluators — every capability in What's in the box plugs in the same way, and each has a matching docs/runbooks/NN-*.md guide in your scaffold that your AI coding assistan