AutoGen Update

[ekzhu]

This is a big update.

It has been two years since we launched the first open-source version of AutoGen. We have made 98 releases, 3,776 commits and resolved 2,488 issues. Our project has grown to 50.4k stars on GitHub and a contributor base of 559 amazing people. Notably, we pioneered the multi-agent orchestration paradigm that is now widely adopted in many other agent frameworks.

At Microsoft, we have been using AutoGen and Semantic Kernel in many of our research and production systems, and we have added significant improvements to both frameworks. For a long time, we have been asking ourselves: how can we create a unified framework that combines the best of both worlds?

Today we are excited to announce that AutoGen and Semantic Kernel are merging into a single, unified framework under the name Microsoft Agent Framework: https://github.com/microsoft/agent-framework. It takes the simple and easy-to-use multi-agent orchestration capabilities of AutoGen, and combines them with the enterprise readiness, extensibility, and rich capabilities of Semantic Kernel. Microsoft Agent Framework is designed to be the go-to framework for building agent-based applications, whether you are a researcher or a developer.

For current AutoGen users, you will find that Microsoft Agent Framework's single-agent interface is almost identical to AutoGen's, with added capabilities such as conversation thread management, middleware, and hosted tools. The most significant change is a new workflow API that allows you to define complex, multi-step, multi-agent workflows using a graph-based approach. Orchestration patterns such as sequential, parallel, Magentic and others are built on top of this workflow API. We have created a migration guide to help you transition from AutoGen to Microsoft Agent Framework: https://aka.ms/autogen-to-af.

AutoGen will still be maintained -- it has a stable API and will continue to receive critical bug fixes and security patches -- but we will not be adding significant new features to it.

As maintainers, we have deep appreciation for all the work AutoGen contributors have done to help us get to this point. We have learned a ton from you -- many important features in AutoGen were contributed by the community. We would love to continue working with you on the new framework.

For more details, read our announcement blog post: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/foundry/introducing-microsoft-agent-framework-the-open-source-engine-for-agentic-ai-apps/.

Eric Zhu, AutoGen Maintainer

[operation-hp]

Thanks for putting together this roadmap! It's great to see the direction laid out clearly.
I'm curious about the community's role going forward. Is there openness to having a community-maintained fork of AutoGen?

Would love to hear from both maintainers and other community members on this. If there's interest, we could potentially organize around keeping AutoGen thriving with community stewardship.

[ElliotWood]

Huge thanks to Eric/Sonichi/Qingyun-wu and everyone who's contributed to AutoGen over the years – you've all built something truly awesome. The multi-agent orchestration work has been groundbreaking and was a blast to contribute/discuss with you all.
Congrats on the merge with Semantic Kernel. Excited to see what comes next with Microsoft Agent Framework. Best of luck to the whole team!