ag2-overview

name	ag2-overview
description	Map of AG2 beta capabilities and which sibling skill to reach for. Load first when the user mentions building with AG2 beta (autogen.beta) but the specific feature isn't yet clear — agents, tools, model config, delegation, memory, observers, structured output, HITL, AG-UI, telemetry, or testing.
license	Apache-2.0

AG2 Beta — capability map

AG2 beta (autogen.beta) is an async, protocol-driven agent framework. The full reference docs live under website/docs/beta/. This skill is the index of sibling skills that cover the common build paths.

When to use

Read this file first when a request mentions "AG2 beta", "autogen.beta", or building agents in this repo and you don't yet know which feature is needed. Use the table below to pick the right specialised skill, then load that skill's SKILL.md for the recipe.

Before you start

Anything you build with AG2 needs three things in place. Get these right once and the rest of the skills run cleanly:

1. Install the right provider extra — pip install "ag2[openai]", ag2[anthropic], ag2[gemini], etc. The *Config class will raise ImportError: ... requires optional dependencies without it.
2. Set the matching API key — OPENAI_API_KEY, ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, GEMINI_API_KEY (or GOOGLE_API_KEY). Loading from a project-root .env via from dotenv import load_dotenv; load_dotenv() is the common pattern.
3. Sanity-check the install — python -c "import sys, autogen; print(sys.executable, autogen.__version__)". If you have multiple Python environments, this confirms which ag2 your script will actually import.

Full per-provider table (install + env var + config class) lives in ag2-quickstart → "Prerequisites".

Pick the right skill

User intent	Skill	What it covers
Build an Agent from scratch, pick a model	ag2-quickstart	Agent, ModelConfig, ask() / reply.ask() chaining, providers, env vars
Give the Agent a custom Python tool	ag2-add-custom-tool	@tool, sync/async, ToolResult, Context, Inject, Variable, Depends
Use shipped tools (web search, code exec, MCP, etc.)	ag2-use-builtin-tools	WebSearchTool, WebFetchTool, CodeExecutionTool, MCPServerTool, ImageGenerationTool, MemoryTool, FilesystemToolkit, DuckDuckSearchTool, ExaToolkit, TavilySearchTool
Run shell commands from an agent	ag2-shell-tool	LocalShellTool (any provider), provider-side ShellTool, sandboxing (allowed/blocked/ignore/readonly)
Get typed Pydantic / dataclass output	ag2-structured-output	response_schema=, ResponseSchema, @response_schema, PromptedSchema, reply.content(), retries
Multi-agent: parallel subtasks or named delegates	ag2-subagent-delegation	tasks=TaskConfig(), run_subtasks(parallel=True), Agent.as_tool(), persistent_stream
Pause for human input or gate a tool with approval	ag2-hitl	context.input(), hitl_hook, approval_required() middleware
Logging, retry, history-trim, custom interception	ag2-middleware	BaseMiddleware, LoggingMiddleware, RetryMiddleware, HistoryLimiter, TokenLimiter, tool middleware
Test agents and tools	ag2-testing	TestConfig, mocking LLM responses, simulating ToolCallEvent
Persistent memory across runs, history compaction, assembly	ag2-knowledge-and-memory	KnowledgeStore, KnowledgeConfig, WorkingMemoryAggregate, AssemblyPolicy, SlidingWindowPolicy, TokenBudgetPolicy, TailWindowCompact, SummarizeCompact
Observability, alerts, halts	ag2-observers-and-alerts	BaseObserver, TokenMonitor, LoopDetector, EventWatch, CadenceWatch, AlertPolicy, HaltEvent
Send images / audio / video / PDFs in	ag2-multimodal-input	ImageInput, AudioInput, VideoInput, DocumentInput, FilesAPI
Web frontend via the AG-UI protocol	ag2-ag-ui	AGUIStream, FastAPI mount, CopilotKit
OpenTelemetry traces / metrics	ag2-telemetry	TelemetryMiddleware, GenAI semconv attributes, content capture

Project conventions for any skill that writes code into the AG2 repo

These are repo-wide rules from CLAUDE.md. Apply them whenever generating code that lands in autogen/beta/:

• Do not use from __future__ import annotations.
• All top-level imports — no function-level imports unless explicitly allowed.
• No nested functions in runtime execution paths (decorator factories are fine).
• No side effects in __init__ — apply them at runtime.
• Internal filesystem paths use pathlib.Path; public signatures accept str | os.PathLike[str].
• Common reusable APIs come from the autogen.beta top-level (e.g. from autogen.beta import Agent, tool, Context); advanced/specialised APIs come from sub-modules (autogen.beta.middleware, autogen.beta.config, etc.).

Beta-doc cross-reference

If a skill's recipe is incomplete for the case at hand, the source docs are at website/docs/beta/. Each sibling skill points to its primary .mdx files in its own "Going deeper" section.