Declarative Agents: Profile-Driven LLM Agent Runtime in Go

Summary

Declarative Agents by Nokia Bell Labs offers a profile-driven runtime and design patterns for building tool-augmented LLM agents. It allows defining agents, their tools, states, and transitions via YAML profiles, eliminating the need for code changes for workflow alterations. This Go-based framework promotes flexible and dependable agent development.

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Introduction

Declarative Agents is a project from Nokia Bell Labs providing a profile-driven runtime and design patterns for declarative, tool-augmented LLM agents. At its core, an agent is defined by a YAML profile, which is then interpreted and executed by a single Go runtime. This approach aims to simplify the development and modification of complex agent workflows.

Why Use It and Key Benefits

Traditional agent frameworks often couple workflow logic tightly with code, meaning any change to an agent's loop or behavior necessitates a binary rebuild. Declarative Agents addresses this by externalizing the agent's definition into a YAML profile. This profile specifies the agent's tools, states, transitions, signals, and budgets.

The primary benefit is flexibility: altering an agent's workflow becomes a simple configuration edit, and creating a new agent does not require compiling new binaries. This significantly speeds up iteration and deployment. The project also includes a companion white paper, Design Patterns for Declarative Agents, which outlines eleven patterns for building reliable agents using this declarative methodology. The modular structure, with components like agent-core for the runtime engine and applications/catalog for reusable blocks, further enhances its utility.

Installation

To get started quickly, you'll need Go and Mage installed. Navigate to one of the packaged applications and run it:

cd applications/agent-architecture
mage run

This command starts the canonical documentation-curator and serves its UI.

Examples

You can validate and run an agent directly from its YAML profile. First, build the core binaries and set the catalog root:

cd agent-core
mage build      # compiles cmd/ binaries into bin/
export AGENT_CATALOG_ROOT=../applications/catalog
bin/agent --profile "$AGENT_CATALOG_ROOT/agents/executor/profile.yaml" --validate-config
bin/agent --profile "$AGENT_CATALOG_ROOT/agents/executor/profile.yaml" --core-root .

The --validate-config flag reads the profile, machine, and tool definitions, then exits, performing a quick boot smoke test. You can swap executor for any other profile found under applications/catalog/agents/.