Philharmonica Agent Development Kit (ADK)

A provider-agnostic Python framework to orchestrate complex systems of agents that perform real-world actions, across 100+ LLMs via litellm.

The concept

An agent is a model that stopped talking and started doing: it calls tools, changes state, and leaves side effects in the world. One agent is useful. A set of specialists that cannot coordinate is a liability.

A philharmonic is not a crowd of capable musicians. It is a score, sections that know their part, and a conductor holding the tempo. This ADK gives you the same three things for agents:

• The score — explicit orchestration. Graphs for state machines, flows for pipelines, swarms for open-ended exploration, handoffs for delegation. You write the structure; nothing is inferred behind your back.
• The sections — agents scoped to one job, each carrying its own tools, guardrails, and budget. An Agent is configuration, never a hidden runtime.
• The conductor — the Runner. Every run travels one execution path, where turns, retries, token budgets, and interrupts are enforced rather than suggested.

The framework never injects a prompt, a tool, or a token you did not ask for, and every cost-bearing default starts bounded. Decisions, tool I/O, and token spend come back as structured traces, so what the ensemble actually did is readable after the fact.

Design tenets

1. Explicit over magical. If you can't step through it in a debugger, it doesn't belong in the orchestration path.
2. One obvious way. Fewer knobs, sharper edges — the ADK has opinions.
3. Everything is inspectable. Decisions, tool I/O, and token costs are structured traces, not anecdotes.
4. Benchmarks or it didn't happen. Claims ship with eval evidence or not at all — including this framework's own.

Core Concepts

• Agents — Autonomous entities with tools, guardrails, and handoffs
• Tools — Function wrappers with schema validation and guardrails
• Handoffs — Agent-to-agent routing (LLM-orchestrated or code-orchestrated)
• Guardrails — Pre/post execution validation at agent and tool level
• Memory — Persistent knowledge across sessions
• Skills — Reusable capability packages (instructions + tools + governance)
• Tracing — OpenTelemetry observability

Installation

Use it in your own project

uv add philharmonica-adk          # or: pip install philharmonica-adk

The core install is deliberately lean — litellm, pydantic, griffe, aiosqlite, typing-extensions — and every optional provider / exporter / UI enhancement is gated behind its own extra:

pip install 'philharmonica-adk[anthropic]'   # native Anthropic SDK path
pip install 'philharmonica-adk[otel]'        # OpenTelemetry tracing bridge
pip install 'philharmonica-adk[mcp]'         # Model Context Protocol client
pip install 'philharmonica-adk[viz]'         # Agent graph visualization (graphviz)
pip install 'philharmonica-adk[verbose]'     # Rich-backed panel/line verbose renderer (ANSI fallback without it)
pip install 'philharmonica-adk[all]'         # all of the above

Work on the ADK itself

Prerequisites: Python 3.12+ and uv (uv installs the interpreter itself if you don't have it).

# 1. Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/augments-labs/philharmonica-adk-python.git
cd philharmonica-adk-python

# 2. Build .venv from the committed lockfile — everything + test + lint + typecheck
uv sync --extra dev

# 3. Run anything inside it
uv run philharmonica --help
uv run pytest

uv sync resolves from uv.lock, so every contributor and every CI job installs byte-identical versions. Activate the environment directly (source .venv/bin/activate) if you would rather not prefix commands with uv run, and swap --extra dev for any other extra (--extra anthropic, --extra all, or none at all) to work against a leaner surface.

Conda works too, if you prefer it:

conda env create -f environment.yaml   # also runs `pip install -e '.[dev]'`
conda activate philharmonica-adk-python

Either way the install is editable: philharmonica.adk is importable from the src/ layout defined in pyproject.toml, and source changes take effect immediately without reinstalling.

API Keys

Set the API keys for the LLM providers you want to use:

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="your-key"
export OPENAI_API_KEY="your-key"
export GEMINI_API_KEY="your-key"

Verify Installation

python -c "from philharmonica.adk import Agent, Runner; print('OK')"

Quick Start

import asyncio
import logging

from philharmonica.adk import Agent, Runner

logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)

agent = Agent(
    name="Assistant",
    system_prompt="You are a helpful assistant.",
)

result = asyncio.run(Runner.arun(agent, "Hello!"))
logger.info(result.final_output)

Command-Line Interface

The philharmonica console script drives agents from the terminal — scaffold a project, validate its config without spending a token, then run or chat:

philharmonica new my_agent                       # scaffold config + tools + schema
philharmonica validate my_agent/agent.json       # strict schema check, no tokens
philharmonica run my_agent/agent.json "hello"    # one-shot run (config or --agent module:var)
philharmonica chat my_agent/agent.json           # interactive REPL, optional --session-db
philharmonica serve my_agent/agent.json                    # REST + health over HTTP ([serve] extra)

run auto-dispatches agents, swarms, graphs, and topologies; every cost-affecting behavior (sessions, verbose rendering, tracing, env files) stays off until you pass its flag. See docs/cli/cli.md for the full command reference.

Deployment

Serve an agent over HTTP, then ship the container to any cloud. The framework imports no server runtime and no cloud SDK — every piece is opt-in, and you keep control of the runtime.

pip install 'philharmonica-adk[serve]'

# Serve locally: REST (POST /run, POST /run_sse) + health (/healthz, /readyz).
philharmonica serve --agent my_agent.app:agent --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000

# Generate the deployment artifacts you own (Dockerfile + manifests):
philharmonica deploy init --target k8s --agent my_agent.app:agent --image my-agent:latest

# Or build and ship to a target via your installed CLIs:
philharmonica deploy build      --agent my_agent.app:agent --image my-agent:latest --push
philharmonica deploy cloud-run  --agent my_agent.app:agent --image gcr.io/PROJECT/my-agent --project PROJECT --region REGION
philharmonica deploy gke        --agent my_agent.app:agent --image IMAGE --project P --region R --cluster C
philharmonica deploy ecs        --agent my_agent.app:agent --image ACCT.dkr.ecr.R.amazonaws.com/my-agent --region R --execution-role-arn ARN

philharmonica deploy targets docker, k8s, gke, helm, cloudrun, ecs, app-runner, and lambda. The generated image satisfies the universal container contract (binds 0.0.0.0:$PORT, config from env, non-root, /healthz + /readyz probes), so the same image runs everywhere. The generated requirements.txt installs philharmonica-adk from PyPI; edit it if you need a pin, a vendored wheel, or a VCS URL instead.

A single replica works out of the box on the default per-pod SQLite stores. For multi-replica (horizontally-scaled) deployments, back A2A tasks and REST sessions with Postgres so state is shared across pods — philharmonica serve --task-dsn "$PG_DSN" --session-dsn "$PG_DSN" (install philharmonica-adk[a2a-postgres,session-postgres]). The AWS deploy commands also accept --push to log in to ECR and build/push the image for you. See docs/deploy/ for the full guide.

Running Examples

All examples are runnable from the project root:

python examples/agent_patterns/agents_as_tools.py
python examples/handoffs/llm_orchestrated.py
python examples/tools/tool_guardrails.py

Project Structure

src/philharmonica/adk/       # Source code (namespace package)
tests/                 # Unit and integration tests
examples/              # Single-file runnable examples (one concept each)
docs/                  # Usage documentation
configs/               # Logging and other configs

Key Dependencies

Core: litellm | pydantic | griffe | aiosqlite | typing-extensions Optional extras: anthropic (.[anthropic]) | mcp (.[mcp]) | opentelemetry-* (.[otel]) | graphviz (.[viz]) | rich (.[verbose])

Acknowledgements

This ADK draws on prior art and ongoing work from across the multi-agent ecosystem:

• LangGraph — state-machine multi-agent orchestration; influence on the graphs/ subsystem.
• CrewAI — multi-agent collaboration patterns.
• OpenAI Swarm — swarm cycle pattern (reference shape for swarms/).
• OpenAI Agents SDK — Runner design and handoff mechanism reference.
• Anthropic Claude Agent SDK — Anthropic-native provider design.
• LiteLLM — provider-agnostic LLM abstraction over 100+ models.
• Model Context Protocol — tool-integration substrate.
• Pydantic — typed validation.
• Temporal — durable execution backbone.
• OpenTelemetry and OpenInference — observability conventions.

Inclusion here records influence, not endorsement.