Action

What are Actions?

Actions form the critical bridge between an agent’s internal decision-making processes and the external world. They allow the system to effect change, adapt to varying circumstances, and achieve specific objectives by responding to observed conditions. This interplay between action selection and environmental feedback is fundamental in developing adaptive, intelligent systems capable of learning from experience and improving their performance over time.

Actions are currently interchangeable with the concept of tools. However, there are plans to expand the concept of actions beyond tools.

Using Actions

There are 2 main ways to use actions:

1. Directly through the agent - actions are linked to a specific agent

2. Standalone - actions can be reused by multiple agents.

The below examples assume the pre-requisite setup for a SwiftAgent

Setup

from swiftagent import SwiftAgent

agent = SwiftAgent()

Agent-Based Actions

You can define agent-based actions using the SwiftAgent.action decorator on a function. Different example cases are shown below.

Basic Setup

python

@agent.action(description="action to get weather")
async def get_weather(location: str, unit: str = "celsius"):
    return f"The weather in {location} is sunny and 22°{unit[0].upper()}"

Using Docstring

Param Descriptions

With Optional Params

Standalone Actions

Standalone actions are defined by the agent decorator, in the exact same way as agent-based actions are defined. The only additional step is that you need to call SwiftAgent.add_action on the standalone action to add it to an agent.

For example,

python

from swiftagent.actions import action

# define action
@action()
async def get_weather(location: str, unit: str = "celsius"):
    """
    action to get weather
    """
    return f"The weather in {location} is sunny and 22°{unit[0].upper()}"
    
# add action
agent.add_action(get_weather)

Action Attributes

Attribute	Parameter	Type	Description
Name	name	Optional[str]	Name of the action. Defaults to the name of the function.
Description	description	Optional[str]	Description of the function. Defaults to the docstring of the function if present. If no docstring, defaults to an empty string.
Parameters	params	Optional[dict]	Optional descriptions of the parameters.
Strict Mode	strict	bool	Whether or not all the parameters are required.