📚 Nous AI Guides
View SourceComprehensive guides for building production-ready AI agents with Nous. Grouped the same way as the HexDocs sidebar.
Core
- Getting Started — install, first agent, tools, streaming, persistence.
- Context & Dependencies — passing
depsto tools/prompts and the run context. - Tool Development — building robust, validated, secure tools.
- Structured Output — typed/validated results via Ecto schemas, schemaless types, or raw JSON schema.
- Skills — reusable instruction/capability packages (module- and file-based) and the built-in catalog.
- Hooks — lifecycle interceptors to block, modify, or audit agent actions.
- Memory — persistent, searchable agent memory (keyword + vector, decay, scoping).
- Knowledge Base — structured, linkable knowledge store and tools.
- Evaluation — test suites, evaluators, metrics, and the optimizer.
- Permissions & Guardrails — tool permission policies, approval gates, and session guardrails.
- Observability & Telemetry — telemetry events, default handler, and Prometheus via PromEx.
Orchestration & Multi-Agent
- Multi-Agent Teams — supervised agent groups, roles, shared state, comms, and rate limiting.
- Decision Graph — track goals, decisions, and outcomes as a graph.
- Deep Research — autonomous multi-step research with citations (
Nous.Research.run/2). - Workflow Engine — DAG/graph-based orchestration of agents, tools, and control flow.
Providers & Backends
- Providers Overview — all 13 providers +
custom:, and how to switch with one string. - Custom Providers — the
custom:OpenAI-compatible prefix. - HTTP Backends — Finch/Req vs Hackney, streaming backpressure.
- Vertex AI Setup — Google Cloud Vertex AI configuration.
- Fallback Chains — automatic provider/model failover.
Integrations & Operations
- Phoenix LiveView Integration — real-time streaming, multi-user coordination, production patterns.
- Production Best Practices — architecture, security, scaling, monitoring.
- Troubleshooting — common development and deployment issues.
- Migration Guide — version upgrades and breaking changes.
Suggested reading order
New to Nous:
- Getting Started → 2. Tool Development →
- Structured Output → 4. Skills → 5. Best Practices
Building something specific:
- Real-time chat → LiveView Integration
- Multiple agents → Teams / Workflows
- Research assistant → Deep Research
- Production hardening → Permissions & Guardrails + Observability
Having issues? → Troubleshooting.
Need hands-on code? See the examples directory and the full API reference on HexDocs.