Decoder. plain-English AI glossary

AutoGen

▲ RisingAutoGen

Microsoft's framework for building multi-agent conversations where agents play roles and negotiate solutions.

Think of it like

A Slack channel where bots argue and agree their way to a solution—structured debate automation.

Example

Create a 'user proxy' agent, a 'coder' agent, and a 'planner' agent. They chat with each other over token limits until they converge on a plan, code, and tests.

How it actually works

AutoGen treats multi-agent as a conversational protocol. Agents are Python objects with state; they send messages to each other, have conversation history, and can interrupt or agree. It's more stateful than CrewAI. Useful for back-and-forth reasoning but tokenization can explode if agents are verbose.

For product teams

Good for workflows that need negotiation, debate, or internal validation before action.

For engineers

Conversation-first design; built-in state management and tool registry; Python native.

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