Contents Overview of agents, tools, and executors How they are used in practice Detailed walkthrough of the mechanics that allow agents to work autonomously in the real world How I used AI to generate this article An overview of agents and executors Agents Agents are classes that leverage on language models and are responsible for performing tasks, answering questions, or solving problems using various tools. They are often used to interact with data sources to assist with problem-solving. Executors An executor on the other hand, is a running instance of an agent and is used to execute tasks based on the agent’s decisions and configured tools. Tools Tools are instances of classes that perform specific tasks or provide specific utilities. These classes are derived from a base class called Tool Examples of tools include: : It utilizes the services for search engine result data. SerpAPI SerpAPI : Provides file reading capabilities. ReadFileTool : Provides file writing capabilities. WriteFileTool The decide which tools to use, and the executes them. agents executors Let’s start with an example We will run through a quick workflow of how we actually use agents and executors in practice. Initialisation When initialising an , it accepts an , which contains the agent, tools, maximum iterations, and optional early stopping method. The AgentExecutor constructor sets the following properties: AgentExecutor AgentExecutorInput agent tools returnIntermediateSteps (default is 15) maxIterations (default is ) earlyStoppingMethod force You can create an using and providing the required input fields. Here’s a working example from the Langchain repository: AgentExecutor AgentExecutor.fromAgentAndTools import { AgentExecutor, ZeroShotAgent } from "langchain/agents";
import { OpenAI } from "langchain/llms/openai";
import { SerpAPI } from "langchain/tools";
import { Calculator } from "langchain/tools/calculator";

export const run = async () => {
  const model = new OpenAI({ temperature: 0 });const tools = [new SerpAPI(process.env.SERPAPI_API_KEY, {location: "Austin,Texas,United States",hl: "en",gl: "us",}),new Calculator(),];
  const agent = new ZeroShotAgent({ allowedTools: ["search", "calculator"] });const agentExecutor = AgentExecutor.fromAgentAndTools({ agent, tools });
  console.log("Loaded agent.");
  
  const input = `Who is Olivia Wilde's boyfriend? What is his current age raised to the 0.23 power?`;
  console.log(`Executing with input "${input}"...`);
  
  const result = await agentExecutor.call({ input });
  console.log(`Got output ${result.output}`);
}; In the code above, we are: Using the as the language model OpenAI Creating a list of tools, mainly the , SerpAPI Calculator Instantiating a type of agent known as the (there’s many types of agents with different use-cases, or you can create your own!) ZeroShotAgent Instantiating an with the agent and tools AgentExecutor Using the method on the agent executor to receive the computed output from the agent .call The execution process of an agent executor When you call the method of the , it triggers the execution process. This is actually just a loop to perform the following actions: .call() AgentExecutor The Agent creates a plan (It’s just a text output by the language model) using the previous steps and inputs in the prompt. The agent parses the text output, and produces either an or . For instance, if the parsed text contains a prefix declared in the variable (By default it’s ) the agent returns an instance of . AgentFinish AgentAction FINAL_ANSWER_ACTION Final Answer: AgentFinish This enables the AgentExecutor to interpret the decision made by the language model and carry out actual executions of tools. If the executor receives the object, the execution loop will be terminated, and the output will be returned using the function, which computes the final output based on the agent's finish step, intermediate steps, and additional data from the agent. AgentFinish getOutput If the executor receives the object, it will process the actions returned by the agent plan, calling the corresponding tools for each action and generating observations. AgentAction The action and observation in each step will be added to the execution steps array. The loop will continue until the maximum number of iterations is reached or function determines to stop. shouldContinue If the maximum number of iterations is reached or early stopping is triggered, the agent will return a stopped response, and the output will be returned using the function. getOutput This looping process of planning, parsing, and executing tools, enables the agents to leverage on the decision making power of language models to build autonomous entities that can carry out more complicated tasks. How I made this technical blog post using AI Interestingly, this article was ~80% generated using a tool i built called Genie (with langchain). The goal for Genie is to help developers understand complex code implementations in minutes instead of hours. Do give it a go if you’re interested! (Check it out if you’re interested) www.birdlabs.ai Here are some of the questions I asked in order to understand the mechanics behind autonomous agents. Getting a brief overview of the Agents and executors 2. Realising I need more information on what tools are 3. Diving deeper into the implementation of an agent executor 4. Realising I need to know how the interprets the responses from the language model Agent That’s all! Follow me for more coding tutorials! I’ll be dropping more tutorials that uses ! Follow my blog and let me know what you want to learn about next :) Genie Let’s keep in touch! Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dion-neo-470a161a6/ Email: dion@birdlabs.ai Twitter: @neowenshun

This story contains new, firsthand information uncovered by the writer.

This story contains AI-generated text. The author has used AI either for research, to generate outlines, or write the text itself. 

The code in this story is for educational purposes. The readers are solely responsible for whatever they build with it.

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Dion Neo

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About Author

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