hermes-agent/architecture/agents.md

Agents

Agents can be viewed as an FSM using an LLM to generate inputs into the system that operates over a DAG.

What this really means is that the agent is just a function without memory that uses text inputs and outputs in a defined order.

def my_agent(*args, **kwargs) -> str:
    # do whatever you want!
    return "Hi I'm an agent!"

Now obviously, that's like saying water's wet, but we're going to be using that definition to inform our design of the library, namely, that we should not store agent state outside the function call.

The Agent Class

So we don't have state, why are we using a class?

Well, we want to initialize things, we want to have some configuration, and we want to have some helper functions. Preferably all in a single place.

class BaseAgent:
    def agent_primitives(self) -> list[BaseAgent]:
        # Returns a list of Agents that are utilized by this agent to generate inputs
        # We use agent primitives here instead of subagents because these are going to be part
        # of the message graph, not a subagent tool call.
        raise NotImplementedError
    
    def tools(self) -> list[BaseTool]:
        # Returns a list of tools that the agent needs to run
        raise NotImplementedError
    
    
    def run(self, config, *args, **kwargs) -> ConversationGraph:
        llm = get_llm(config)
        tools = self.tools()
        for agent in self.agent_primitives():
            tools.extend(agent.tools())
        tools = remove_duplicates(tools)
        tools = initialize_tools(tools, config)
        return self(llm, tools, config, *args, **kwargs)
    
    @staticmethod
    def __call__(self, llm, tools, config, *args, **kwargs) -> ConversationGraph:
        # Returns a ConversationGraph that can be parsed to get the output of the agent
        # Use w/e args/kwargs you want, as long as llm/tools/config are satisfied. 
        raise NotImplementedError

Doesn't seem too bad (I hope), it is a bit annoying that we don't initialize everything in the constructor, but hopefully we all kinda like it :)