Introducing smolagents: simple agents that write actions in code.

Today we are launching smolagents, a very simple library that unlocks agentic capabilities for language models. Here’s a glimpse:

from smolagents import CodeAgent, DuckDuckGoSearchTool, HfApiModel

agent = CodeAgent(tools=[DuckDuckGoSearchTool()], model=HfApiModel())

agent.run("How many seconds would it take for a leopard at full speed to run through Pont des Arts?")

Table of Contents

• 🤔 What are agents?
• ✅ When to use agents / ⛔ when to avoid them
• Code agents
• Introducing smolagents: making agents simple 🥳
  • Building an agent
  • How strong are open models for agentic workflows?
• Next steps 🚀

🤔 What are agents?

Any efficient system using AI will need to provide LLMs some kind of access to the real world: for instance the possibility to call a search tool to get external information, or to act on certain programs in order to solve a task. In other words, LLMs should have agency. Agentic programs are the gateway to the outside world for LLMs.

AI Agents are programs where LLM outputs control the workflow.

Any system leveraging LLMs will integrate the LLM outputs into code. The influence of the LLM's input on the code workflow is the level of agency of LLMs in the system.

Note that with this definition, "agent" is not a discrete, 0 or 1 definition: instead, "agency" evolves on a continuous spectrum, as you give more or less power to the LLM on your workflow.

The table below illustrates how agency varies across systems:

The multi-step agent has this code structure:

memory = [user_defined_task]
while llm_should_continue(memory): # this loop is the multi-step part
    action = llm_get_next_action(memory) # this is the tool-calling part
    observations = execute_action(action)
    memory += [action, observations]

✅ When to use agents / ⛔ when to avoid them

You could know in advance that the requests will belong to either of 2 buckets (based on user choice), and you have a predefined workflow for each of these 2 cases.

But what if the workflow can't be determined that well in advance?