AG-UI: Build AI Agent UIs for Your Frontend (Open Source Tutorial)

This year has seen a significant increase in AI agent protocols, making agent usability easier than ever. However, a standardized way for AI agents to connect directly to front-end applications, where actual user interaction happens, has been missing. AGUI, a new open standard protocol, is designed to fill that gap.

What is AGUI?

AGUI stands for Agent User Interaction. It's a lightweight, event-based protocol that standardizes how AI agents connect to front-end interfaces, such as web apps, mobile apps, or any custom UI. AGUI aims to make agent-human interaction seamless, modular, and consistent.

The AGUI Dojo

To showcase AGUI in action, the AGUI Dojo is a demo playground highlighting the core building blocks of AGUI for agent-user interaction. Each demo focuses on a specific feature, such as:

• Streaming updates

• Chat interfaces

• Shared states

These demos are implemented in a small amount of code (50-200 lines), making it easy for developers to understand, customize, and reuse these components in their own projects. The goal is to keep things simple, modular, and practical.

Why Use AGUI?

AGUI is designed for developers building interactive AI workflows that require real-time updates and shared states. It's best suited for human-in-the-loop collaboration, offering a simple, open protocol for connecting AI agents to front ends. It's compatible with tools like Copilot Kit and offers efficient communication patterns, streaming support, and best practices for chat state updates and user-agent coordination. AGUI connects your application to various frameworks like Langraph, AG2, Crew AI, and Mastra.

AGUI is essentially the missing link between powerful AI agents and real-time user-facing applications, standardizing how they interact, co-work, and stay in sync. It transforms fragmented backend-heavy workflows into collaborative human-in-the-loop experiences with minimal code.

Getting Started with AGUI

There are two ways to get started with AGUI:

1. Build an AI agent with the protocol.
2. Connect to the front end with the protocol.

To connect to AGUI, you'll need to fulfill certain prerequisites, including:

• Node.js

• npm or yarn

• An OpenAI API key

Installation Steps

1. Set your API key using the export or set command (depending on your operating system).
2. Clone the AGUI repository.
3. Navigate to the ag-ui directory.
4. Enter the playground by typing cd dojo.
5. Install necessary requirements using npm install.
6. Run the application and access it on your localhost.

This opens up the playground and will help you grasp what you can do with AGUI and how it connects your UI to your AI agent. The documentation explains how to modify and connect to OpenAI's API, bridging OpenAI with AGUI and implementing other models.

AGUI Dojo Demos

The AGUI Dojo provides various interactive demos. Here are a few examples:

• Agentic Chat: Chat with your co-bot and call front-end tools. For instance, you can change the background color using a chat command.

• Human-in-the-Loop: Plan a task together with the AI and direct the copilot to take the right steps.

• Agentic Generative UI: Assign long-running tasks to your copilot.

• Tool-Based Generative UI: Use tools within the front end, such as requesting a haiku on a specific topic.

• Shared State: Use a recipe co-bot that reads and updates collaboratively.

• External Demos: Showcasing co-agents in research workflows

The Dojo showcases the capabilities of AGUI in powering your application and adding interactive features.

Building with AGUI

The "Build with AGUI" documentation showcases how to build an HTTP endpoint compatible with the AGUI protocol. This enables seamless integration with agent frameworks like Copilot Kit.

The guide progresses from a simple "Hello World" response to parsing structured agent input data and implementing server-sent events for real-time event streaming.

Conclusion

AGUI is a standardized protocol for building real-time, event-driven agent interfaces with minimal effort. It enables seamless integrations between AI agents and modern front ends. It is highly recommended to explore AGUI and its capabilities.