Build real agentic apps using CUGA: two dozen working examples on a lightweight harness
CUGA (pip install cuga), short for Configurable Generalist Agent, the Agent Harness for the Enterprise from IBM handles that, so you write just a tool list and a prompt. We built two-dozen single-file apps to prove it. Read one end to end here, then see how the same agent runs sovereign and governed in production without a rewrite.
Key Takeaways
- Most agentic apps start with a week of plumbing before the agent does anything useful.
You pick a framework, wire up a model client, write tool adapters, build some way to stream state to a UI, and somewhere in there you also decide what the agent is actually for.
- They exist to be read and copied.
- It plans before it acts, then executes with a mix of tool calls and generated code (CodeAct).
- Most harnesses assume a frontier model sits underneath and lean on it to recover when a plan goes sideways; CUGA does that work itself.
The planning, the reflection step, the variable-tracking that keeps a long run on course - that's the harness carrying load the model would otherwise have to, which is what lets a smaller open-weight model hold up where it normally wouldn't.
- Everything below that line is the harness.
Most agentic apps start with a week of plumbing before the agent does anything useful. You pick a framework, wire up a model client, write tool adapters, build some way to stream state to a UI, and somewhere in there you also decide what the agent is actually for. The interesting part arrives last.
It's the open-source agent harness from IBM that handles the planning, the execution loop, the tool calls, and the state plumbing for you. What's left is the part that's actually yours: which tools the agent can reach, and what you tell it to do. To show what that feels like in practice, we built cuga-apps : two dozen small, working apps, each a single FastAPI file wrapping one , from a movie recommender to an IBM Cloud architecture advisor.
They exist to be read and copied. You can click through the live gallery . This article walks through one of them, names what the harness takes off your plate, and shows where the same code goes when you need it governed for production.
For more details please read the original article at Hugging Face.
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