Definition
Plain language
A popular open-source framework for building systems of multiple AI agents that talk to each other.
As stated in the literature
Microsoft's open-source multi-agent orchestration framework for composing LLM agents that communicate via natural language.
Why it matters: It made multi-agent LLM systems easy enough to build that they moved from research curiosity to a common pattern in production.
For example, with AutoGen you can wire up a 'planner' agent, a 'coder' agent, and a 'critic' agent that pass messages until a task is done.
Heard on the show
“AutoGen, LangGraph, CrewAI — they encode coordination in prompts and workflow graphs without formal semantics.”Episode 034 — Catching Multi-Agent Deadlocks Before Deployment With a 40-Year-Old Tool