smolagents
huggingface/smolagents
Minimal, code-first agents — the lightweight end of the stack.
Hugging Face's smolagents keeps the agent loop tiny and lets agents write Python code as actions (CodeAct) instead of JSON tool calls. A refreshing counterpoint to heavyweight frameworks.
In the news
Microsoft Agent Framework unifies AutoGen and Semantic Kernel
Microsoft announces the public preview of its Agent Framework, converging AutoGen's multi-agent research lineage with Semantic Kernel's enterprise abstractions — a major consolidation in orchestration frameworks.
Google open-sources the Agent Development Kit
Google launches ADK, a modular open-source framework for building agents with Gemini integration, multi-agent hierarchies and A2A support — Google's major entry into the framework wars.
Related projects
OpenClaw
openclaw/openclaw
The viral open-source personal AI assistant that really does things.
OpenClaw (born as Clawdbot in late 2025) is a self-hosted personal agent that connects your chats, email, browser and terminal into one always-on assistant. Its explosive growth — hundreds of thousands of stars within months — made 'personal agent harness' a mainstream category.
DeepSeek Harness
deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness
Everything is a Plugin — DeepSeek's open agent harness.
DeepSeek Harness is the breakout open-source harness of 2026: an architecture where everything — tools, subagents, even the loop itself — is a plugin. A Desktop app for macOS and Windows followed in October 2026, and the project passed 240k stars in under three months.
AutoGPT
Significant-Gravitas/AutoGPT
The 2023 experiment that started the autonomous agent wave.
AutoGPT gave GPT-4 a loop, a memory and tools and let it run — kicking off the entire autonomous-agent category. Now rebuilt as a platform for building, deploying and continuously improving agents.