Introduction

agentling is a tiny async framework for building reliable, observable, tool-using agents in Python. It gives you a clean ReAct loop, typed memory, streaming events, recoverable failures, and progressive-disclosure skills, in a codebase small enough to read in one sitting.

The framework is built around one idea: an agent is a loop that turns a model, some tools, and a memory of what happened into more actions, until it has an answer. Everything else, including streaming, skills, self-healing, and persistence, is a thin layer on top of that loop.

Why agentling

Async first. The loop, tools, and model calls are all async. Tool calls in a single step run concurrently by default.
One code path. Blocking and streaming share the exact same loop. There is a single async generator; blocking mode just drains it.
Typed memory. A run is a list of typed steps, not a bag of raw messages. Steps know how to render themselves back into model messages and serialize to JSON for persistence and replay.
Progressive-disclosure skills. Drop a SKILL.md folder in and the model sees only its name and description until it decides to load it. Big skill libraries stay cheap.
Self-healing. A tool that raises becomes an observation the model can recover from, not a crash.
Small and readable. No metaclasses, no plugin registry, no DSL. Around 800 lines of source you can actually read.

A taste of the API

import asyncio
 
from agentling import Agent, OpenAIModel, tool
 
 
@tool
def get_weather(city: str) -> str:
    """Get the current weather for a city.
 
    Args:
        city: The city to look up.
    """
    return f"It is 22C and sunny in {city}."
 
 
async def main() -> None:
    agent = Agent(model=OpenAIModel("gpt-4o-mini"), tools=[get_weather])
    print(await agent.run("What's the weather in Paris?"))
 
 
asyncio.run(main())

That is a complete, working agent. The @tool decorator turns a plain function into a schema-validated tool, and Agent.run drives the loop until the model produces an answer.

When to use it

agentling is a good fit when you want to understand and control every part of your agent: a service that calls a handful of trusted tools, a CLI assistant, a background worker that needs resumable runs, or a research harness where you want full visibility into each step.

It is deliberately small, so some things are out of scope: there is no built-in tracing backend, no sandboxing, and no automatic context summarization. The Limitations are documented honestly, and the hooks to build those layers yourself are part of the public API.

Status

agentling is in alpha (0.x). The API may still change before 1.0. Follow the changelog for release notes.

Introduction

Why agentling

A taste of the API

When to use it

Status

Next steps