Apache Burr: Build reliable AI agents and applications

I'm still on the fence about agent frameworks, they have their place, and it depends on the nature of the agent: e.g. "Low latency, return a good enough response in 3 seconds, vs. working for 3 hours on a problem."

BUT, if you boil it down, an agent really is context building, making an LLM call, executing requested tool calls, parsing the final model output, returning it to some frontend. There's extensions like memory, async tool calls, etc, but not THAT complicated from a traditional software engineering perspective.

Everyone seems to want to build their agent framework. But if you're tasked with building an agent, I've found it much easier and more maintainable to just build 1:1 code for THAT agent: most of the abstractions you get from an agent framework purely get in the way and obfuscate core agent logic.

You end up being forced to use the abstractions chosen by the agent framework, which sometimes are a mismatch for what you're actually trying to do.

I've been working with jido https://jido.run and would definitely recommend it

A builder pattern and decorators.

Yes, Python has decorators, but they're best used as "filters" that apply to functions or methods. Cache this, serialize the output of this function always, prepare this function to be used as a tool by an agentic harness. Not registration, not flow control. You may disagree but someone has to say it; FastAPI influenced the modern use of decorators far too much in the wrong direction.

Builder patterns are a Rust convention, because Rust has no named keyword arguments. A Python function already exposes a named contract. There is very little reason to ever to sequentially pass configuration parameters in chained method calls. If you need to add state that doesn't exist yet to a constructor or factory, that is not a builder pattern. That is registration. The one place where builder patterns should be tolerated is query builders. They iteratively build on a concept and having the additional "slot" for metadata (method name plus keyword arguments) is genuinely useful. Using methods which accept single parameter instead of keyword arguments is incorrect.

How does this compare to https://strandsagents.com/ ? I'm interested in tools in this space, right now I'm not attached to one, but Bedrock + Serverless on Agent Core feels like the "easy guided path" though I don't like the platform lock-in

On a tangent, can anyone recommend good coding agent orchestration tools or platform? Something to launch, manage and monitor codex or claude agents in multiple machines

Ideally self-hostable/open source

I know claude code has a lot of that internally built in already, but it’s claude-only

I couldn't find an explicit reference for the naming, but for anyone wondering there is a Hamilton example: https://github.com/apache/burr/tree/main/examples/multi-agen...

First time I hear about Burr, curious why it was incubated in Apache.

I think the marketing copy probably needs to focus on differentiating features vs any myriad of agent frameworks. I took one look at the sample and immediately said "This is literally just langgraph with a builder pattern"

Wow, such a un-apache-y homepage I've ever seen, vs. the canonical one: https://httpd.apache.org/ (And wow, they still keep releasing it!)

The best agent framework is Pi (pi.dev). It is minimal and doesn't assume a use case, runs fine interactively or non-interactively, has an active community building with it and supports everything you need to build whatever kind of agent you want with plugins.

How are agents authenticated?

I searched the docs for authentication and mcp (one of the protocols which, among other things, handles some pieces of authentication/authorization) but didn't see any results.

What did I miss?

Is this comparable to https://dspy.ai/ ?

I just create a MVP chatbot for a client that has a Django app. I took the route to no frameworks. Claude/codex wrote the agent loop, the tools, the streaming..it’s working well for the MVP, we’ll see

One of the co-creators/maintainers here! Will try to answer Qs over the day.

vibe coded landing page

reddit user testimonial

framework is for state machines

why man..

Claude Opus really loves this template when building websites. It's very funny how many times I've seen it for recent launches.

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