AI product Open source
12-Factor Agents is an open-source guide from HumanLayer covering principles for building reliable LLM-powered applications for production customers; it is maintained as a public repository that welcomes feedback and contributions. Its 12 factors address owning prompts and context windows, treating tools as structured outputs, unifying execution and business state, pausing and resuming through simple APIs, human interaction through tool calls, control-flow ownership, compacting errors into context, focused agents, user-triggered execution, and stateless reducers. The guide describes an agent loop in which an LLM selects a structured tool call or completion, deterministic code executes the call, and the result is appended to the context before the next decision; it advocates incorporating small, modular agent concepts into existing software rather than depending wholly on a framework. The content and images are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, while code is licensed under Apache 2.0.
1 use taken from transcripts — each links to the moment in the video.
Human Layer's open-source repository of guidance for building reliable LLM agents, linked via the speaker's profile as related work on agentic engineering.
1 in the library.