Framework Overview

Active Agent provides a structured approach to building AI-powered applications through Agent Oriented Programming. Designing applications using agents allows developers to create modular, reusable components that can be easily integrated into existing systems. This approach promotes code reusability, maintainability, and scalability, making it easier to build complex AI-driven applications with the Object Oriented Ruby code you already use today.

Agent instructions are action views rendered as system messages to
the agent's context prompt.messages.

Actions render user/assistant/tool messages using the views associated with the agent based on Action View naming conventions. Tools can be defined by providing json action views, but actions could also just be formatted prompt message templates or assistant response templates.

Core Concepts

Active Agent is built around a few core concepts that form the foundation of the framework. These concepts are designed to be familiar to developers who have experience with Ruby on Rails, making it easy to get started with Active Agent.

• Agents are abstract controllers that handles AI interactions using a specified generation provider. Agents are more that lifeless objects, they are the controllers of your application's AI features. They are responsible for managing the flow of data and interactions between different components of your application. Active Agent provides a set of tools and conventions to help you build agents that are easy to understand, maintain, and extend.
• Actions: are the agent's interface to perform tasks and render Action Views for templated agent prompts and user interfaces. They provide a way to define reusable components (or leverage your existing view templates) that can be easily integrated into different agents. Actions can be used to retrieve datacreate custom views, handle user input, and manage the flow of data between different components of your application.
• Prompts are the core data model that contains the runtime context, messages, actions (tools), and configuration for the prompt.
• Views: are responsible for presenting the formatted message content used in a prompt's context and its associated data to the agent and user.
• Generation Provider: A generation provider is the agent's backend interface to AI services that enable agents to generate content, embeddings, and perform actions through tool calls.

Queued Generation Jobs

Active Agent provides a built-in job queue for generating content asynchronously. This allows for efficient processing of requests and ensures that the application remains responsive even during heavy load. Scale it just like you would with any other Rails application with Active Jobs.

Generation Providers are the AI Service Backends

Generation providers are the backend interfaces to AI services that enable agents to generate content, embeddings, and request actions. They provide a common interface for different AI providers, allowing developers to easily switch between them without changing the core application logic. Using generate_with method, you can easily switch between different providers, configurations, instructions, models, and other parameters to optimize the agentic processes.