Workflow Agents, Threads and Tools

[nmccann]

Hi,

With the recent fixes to bugs that prevented use of threads with Workfow agents (created via workflow.as_agent()), I've been trying to see how I can simplify my workflow by leveraging this and other techniques.

One challenge that I've had is with tool calls, a naive workflow like so (pseudocode), results in tool call results in the thread, I'm concerned this will cause bloat in token usage:

Workflow:
   router -> agent (makes tool call) -> yields output

Workflow Thread now includes:
   User input
   Tool call
   Tool result
   Assistant output

An alternative would be to wrap the agent in another executor which internally calls run, with a different stream:

Workflow:
   router -> custom executor (calls agent with different thread which makes tool call) -> yields output

Workflow Thread now includes:
   User input
   Assistant output

The downside with the this approach is that it requires an additional executor, and the recently added kwargs functionality that allows additional parameters to flow from the initial workflow run/run_stream call to tools doesn't work. So if you want additional parameters to flow through, you'd have to extract them from the workflow's shared context and pass them to the new agent run call. If this is the recommended approach, it would be nice to export the WORKFLOW_RUN_KWARGS_KEY constant to consumers, so that it's easier to pull the kwargs out of the shared context.

A third approach, would be to subclass AgentThread and override on_new_messages to intercept and exclude tool calls from the main "workflow thread". In my quick experiments, that seems to give me the expected result, but doesn't feel like the right way to do it.

Maybe WorkflowBuilder.register_agent() could have additional parameters to control the types of output that are included in the workflow thread, similar to how it has an output_response parameter?

[moonbox3]

Apologies for the delay here. I am going to turn this into an issue so we can better track it.

[moonbox3]

Created as #3172, if you want to follow along.