64
Show HN: Druids – Build your own software factory
Hi HN!
Druids (https://github.com/fulcrumresearch/druids) is an open-source library for structuring and running multi-agent coding workflows. Druids makes it easy to do this by abstracting away all the VM infrastructure, agent provisioning, and communication. You can watch our demo video here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVJqW-tvSy4) to see what it looks like.
At a high level:
- Users can write Python programs that define what roles the agents take on and how they interact with each other.
- A program is made of events - clear state transitions that the agents or clients can call to modify state. Each event gets exposed as an agent tool.
- Druids provisions full VMs so that the agents can run continuously and communicate effectively.
We made Druids because we were making lots of internal coding tools using agents and found it annoying to have to rearrange the wiring every time.
As we were building Druids, we realized a lot of our internal tools were easier to express as an event-driven architecture – separating deterministic control flow from agent behavior – and this design also made it possible to have many agents work reliably.
We had issues with scaling the number of concurrent agents within a run, so we decided to have each program run in an isolated sandbox program runtime, kind of the same way you run a Modal function. Each agent then calls the runtime with an agent token, which checks who can talk to who or send files across VMs, and then applies the tool call.
Our early users have found the library useful for:
- running many agents to do performance optimization
- building custom automated software pipelines for eg code review, pentesting, large-scale migrations, etc...
We've heard that the frontier labs have the infrastructure to quickly spin up 100 agents and have them coordinate with each other smoothly in various ways. We're hoping that Druids can be a starting point to make that infrastructure more accessible.
I love the idea of using a shared event log for coordination. Smart!
I have a Symphony-style[1] factory, which keeps all the context in a single session, but I want to start splitting into stations with separate sessions, and I hadn’t worked out how to do communication between sessions.
[1] https://github.com/openai/symphony
Personally, I’ve had "maintenance" and "auditing" sessions successfully drop notes in a my loop’s "inbox" directory (even though it was intended for my use).
I’d say that works as a simple initial approach. Second step is clarifying the "return address" and protocol, but what’s nice is that the message can actually contain those, meaning the protocol itself can evolve seamlessly over time.
Which can also cause drift, though :/
Can you expand on your approach of defining things around state transitions? Are you thinking of it as the state of a task (built, validated, integrated, etc)? Or something else entirely? I'm not sure I followed that part and it seemed rather key.
The multi-agent coordination problem is real. i've been running claude code solo all week and even that gets messy. Spinning up 5 agents that actually talk to each other cleanly sounds hard to get right. Curious how the environment isolation holds up at scale?
I'm going to check this out. I’ve been working on my end-to-end development method and these types of holistic pipelines I think are the future. (or the present!)
I've decided to start with concept capture, which then builds out strategy docs, which feed into specs, etc ... might be time for me to share, but I'm in the process of battle testing myself!
Looking at your post again, I guess I could script a concepting agent to help hone the idea?
When you have 5 workers + a judge all running in isolated VMs, what is a workflow for tracing a failure? Can I replay the event log locally, or inspect what each agent tried? And also, can agents share intermediate logs, results without going through the event system?
yes, you can read the logs, and see full actions, the agents can send messages to each other, and I am also about to make it possible for them to optionally read each other's traces
Interesting. I like it. Now let's say I currently use the OS process as my primitive for agents, just spawning `claude "foo bar baz"`, and orchestrating this way, using perhaps Unix style of files for intermediate data and piping for transformations. What would you are some good use cases of Druid for someone like me?
What do you do with those agents? It's useful if you want to iterate on a flow and have more control over the orchestration/environment
> - building custom automated software pipelines for eg code review, pentesting, large-scale migrations, etc...
I'd be interested in hearing more about how you did this, sounds super valuable
Yeah, I guess we have sandboxes qwith our various code environemnts, and then we've been developing programs that run agents to do various things, which we iterated on to make them better at the task.
For example, one spawns copies of the env with a PR and runs agents in the dev env to verify by running and demonstrating functionality and then comments on github
another one is just a generic software factory that spawns a bunch of agents to coordinate on some repo, others do a redteaming flow, etc...
Seems like a powerful concept, and I'm excited to try it, but yikes does the code snippet seem like a textbook example of primitive obsession.
Very cool!
really cool,learned a lot from your project
Great idea