I believe its quite unique as far as agents go. Runtime is config driven, so you can get caching, state management, security (oauth2, jwt) , Tools and MCP capabilities are granted based on scope allocation (file:read, api:write, map:generate) etc, retry handlers, push notifications / webhooks (for long running tasks). This means you can get a fully baked agent built in minutes, using just the CLI.
From there, when you need to customize and write you own business logic, you can code whatever you want and inherit all of AgentUps middleware, and have it as a plugin to the core. This is pretty neat, as it means you're plugins can be pinned as dependencies.
I am Luke, an open source developer. I originally worked a lot in security (I created a software supply chain project called sigstore). Over the past couple of months, I spent some time building AI agents alongside chatting with other developers attempting the same , and there seemed to be a fair amount of fog in the air around how to do auth, middleware, and all the normal trappings.
AgentUp came out of that. I started to make the agents I was building into reproducible things, so I could then easily spin up other agents. From there I started to add more and it became a framework eventually.
I also noticed a lot of folks were building their own Tools / Function calls over and over, and i thought, it would be nice if these were pluggable, which is where the AgentUp plugin system came from.
So there is what I have started calling 'Core' agentUp, and then plugins (tools) are entry points with their own dedicated interfaces, yet they can inherit all of the cores middleware. Plugins are also limited by scopes, so the core can enforce fine grained access control to each plugin, using the familiar style of domain:type:capability (e.g system:admin: ["system:write", "system:read"]), this way systems can scope policy within token scopes (jwt, oauth2) and AgentUp will enforce for each user. I am yet to really dig into the isolation capabilities in python, but will try to spend some more time there if the project gets momentum.
Last but not least, the Agents are A2A compatible. JSON RPC, streaming / non streaming, Tasks, Parts, Artifacts etc. MCP servers exposed via the Agents are streamable HTTP.
At the moment, I am self funded so not a startup as such, but I am previous founder and my last gig was a distinguished engineer at Red Hat.
Let me know if this interests you, there will be a bucket load of bugs, so lots of fun to be had if anyone wants in!
Amazon are absolutely scumsters, and this is why I would never work for them. I had their recruiters trying to headhunt me for engineering roles in AWS, but they can go and sling one. This is also why I will never buy any goods from them. support local business instead.
Sometimes I scoff at the Health and Safety laws we have in the UK (It can get a little draconian sometimes), but then I look at what happens in a country where no such thing exists (or little application of it).
Having largely moved out of the UK to Germany, I can see that the UK has a care for human life and safety that is unrivalled so far. (Despite the literal shitshow of the last few years as water companies dump sewage)
The UK has so much good design in all the systems where humans are concerned, from clear signage to walking surfaces, plus checks and balances to provide for redundancy, that you start taking it all for granted.
India on the other hand - I'm of Indian heritage - is a chaotic hellscape where life is cheap. I have an apartment there and recently smooke started pouring out a water pump, somebody mentioned it on the Whatsapp group and eventually someone went to investigate and found it burnt out. You can see so many problems here:
1) Response time slow
2) Problem not treated urgently
3) No electrical cut out
4) No temperature cut out
Basically the sort of thing that you would find sixty years ago in the UK, a malfunctioning device can simply carry on malfunctioning to the extent that it could cause a fire in an entire apartment block. The UK is not immune from this - see Grenfell fire where bad cladding caused many deaths - but we have a full-scale public inquiry and legislation and a lot of very pissed-off people in comparison.
I've only visited the UK once, but I was very weirded out by how obsessed they are with fire prevention.
The person I was visiting lived in a student dorm / residence hall at the time. They had special fire doors in the middle of most long hallways, they were wired up to the fire alarm system and would magnetically shut down if an alarm was raised. When shut, they separated different parts of the hallway from each other and prevented the fire from spreading, and you had to hold them open if you wanted to pass through. There were also some extremely strict rules around what electric devices you were allowed to have, with staff being authorized to enter people's rooms with notice and do compliance checks.
Here in Poland (which is an EU country presumably following all EU-mandated safety rules), the regulations in such buildings are usually along the lines of "do whatever as long as you don't cause property damage and/or permanent changes, we might do a check if you do something really egregious and other residents complain." No fire doors of course, although smoke detectors and PA systems for alarms do exist.
Smoke kills, the things you’re describing are a lot to do with stopping smoke spreading. The UK shares a performance based approach with the Netherlands whereas the German and Italians do things in a prescriptive way. There’s no “EU way”.
Sometime between WW2 and now, human lives started to be valued significantly more. I have only a vague idea about this process. Was it continuous, or through several steps? I have a feeling that the invention of three point seat belts played a role, in showing that small measures can have huge impact. But when I grew up (Sweden in the 70s) seatbelts were only mandatory in the front seats, and me and my brother sat in the back seat without. I think this was common and not parental negligence at the time.
Yes, same in the UK, I grew up without seat belts and then in the 1980s, they became a thing - "clunk-click, every trip" - and then only much later, compulsory for rear passengers.
It's step-by-step, building on top of the previous thing, slowly inculating into the population the respect for life and how it's the responsibility of every person, company and government. You belt up, cars add airbags, the government improves roads and traffic management. If all of those things are in place, things get better. In India, it's very much "god will protect me".
My own attitude changes so bizarrely when I'm in India. In Europe it's belt up, put your helmet on, and in India, let's all get into this Autorickshaw and hurtle through traffic. I must be mad.
I imagine people thought that the back of the front seat would stop the rear-seat passengers. You should also remember that dashboards were every hard, and that windshield glass would rip you to shreds.
I’m sure you know that the Swedish company Volvo released its patents on three point seatbelts so that all auto companies could use them. Pretty amazing.
It was actually around World War I that these kind of safety issues became well known to the public. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the books of Upton Sinclair, and the muckrakers started to bring awareness to a lot of formerly ignored problems like this.
Yes that I am aware about, and it actually happened earlier. So cars had three point belts when I grew up, but they were not mandatory to use in the rear seat. (Actually, I think they did not have three point belts in the rear when I think about it, but they had in the front)
To your point: I was in HYD for a consulting gig a few years ago and it was ABSOLUTELY WILD seeing downed and probably hot power cables just lying there on the street waiting to fry some poor soul. They looked well-shielded but some of them were cut open!
Are you suggesting safety standards are higher in the UK than in Germany? Where do you see the differences? From what I read, safety standards in the UK seem to be lower than in Germany but what do I know.
So my general observations, for example, on roads:
the lack of speed limits on many highways, or only two lanes on others, which leads to many more lane-changing manouevres between high- and low-speed lanes; or very short-throw entry and exit lanes with extremely sharp curves and abrupt changes of speed; lack of organization and coordination around road-works to provide safe alternatives; the multitude of badly-designed junctions; terrible signage blocking traffic lights and visibility of oncoming traffic; the lack of ice and snow clearance on roads and pavements and cycle lanes; And I say this as someone who rides my bicycle every weekday to get to class. It's been a nightmare and I've just fitted studded tyres which has massively helped. In the UK, these routes would have been cleared.
I mean, both countries are pretty safe on the global scale of things, so we're complaining about things of a high standard to start with, but the figures kind of bear this out:
And the UK (or Great Britain which is just the mainland) had 706 car user deaths in 2021 compared with 1118 in Germany which is quite considerable. Injuries are harder to compare because of the variation in severity and the scale by which they are measured, but a dead body is a dead body. Fatalities means deaths occurring within 30 days of an RTA.
So when you get to Road Deaths, as opposed to car users, Germany jumps to 2562 deaths in 2021 vs 1608 for the UK, and that is 31/million pop vs 24/million pop to normalize things (no normalized figures on the sheet for car users).
Thanks. I did not read your main comment for being mainly road related. In non-road related areas I am pretty confident Germany has more safety measures than UK. The non-existing speed limit and the German love for car(lobbies) appear to be quite similar to the love of weapons in the US. I am not comparing weapons with cars here. Just their lobbies and public relationship with them.
https://github.com/RedDotRocket/AgentUp
I believe its quite unique as far as agents go. Runtime is config driven, so you can get caching, state management, security (oauth2, jwt) , Tools and MCP capabilities are granted based on scope allocation (file:read, api:write, map:generate) etc, retry handlers, push notifications / webhooks (for long running tasks). This means you can get a fully baked agent built in minutes, using just the CLI.
From there, when you need to customize and write you own business logic, you can code whatever you want and inherit all of AgentUps middleware, and have it as a plugin to the core. This is pretty neat, as it means you're plugins can be pinned as dependencies.
Plugin Example: https://github.com/RedDotRocket/AgentUp-systools
You then end up with a portable agent, where anyone can clone the repo, `agentup run` and like docker, it pulls in all it needs and is serving.
Its currently aligned with the A2A specification, so it will talk to Pydantic, Langchain and Google Agent SDK developed agents.
Its early days, but getting traction.
Previous to this , I created sigstore and have been building OpenSource for many years.
The docs also give a good overview: https://docs.agentup.dev