Autogen

What The Project Is:

AutoGen is a Microsoft framework for agenic AI, built to simplify building a complex multi-agent conversation system into creating modular reusable agents and their interactions. It can be found here. Microsoft claims this tool results in a 4x reduction in coding effort. Below is a diagram from a Microsoft blog post that shows this type of conversation model:

a digram of agents having a conversation

However, I didn’t actually get involved with the LLM part of this product. My bugfix was on the website presence found here. This website acts as a central hub for Autogen news, documentation, blogs, and examples.

Why I Picked It:

I picked this project because I found an open issue on http://goodfirstissues.com/ that aligned with my skillset (web development). Looking further into it, I saw that it was a very active project and I knew that my conversations with the community would be professional since it’s managed by Microsoft.

How My Comm Arch Experience Helped Choose A Community:

My CommArch experience made me pay attention to the distribution of contributors, quality of documentation, and overall activity of the community. Autogen doesn’t rely on one contributor and has small contributors as well as “drive-bys”. It also has organized and extensive documentation and increasing levels of activity. From this information, I decided that Autogen is a stable community to contribute to.

Contributing

What resources Were Already Available:

Autogen has lots of user resources here and a contributor guide here. It uses the Microsoft open source Code of Conduct and the github lists a Creative Commons Public License and an MIT liscense.

The Issue

How I Picked My Issue And What It Was:

I chose issue #2053 which I found from its “good first issue” label. It was theoretically a quick fix and within my skillset as it was just a CSS issue. The issue was posted 3 weeks ago (as of writing this) by Jack Gerrits, a software engineer at Microsoft working on AutoGen. It was described as “on the website home page the icons are off center” and provided this screenshot:

screenshot of off center website icons

How I Went About Pursuing It (And The Challenges Therein):

First, I commented on the issue, saying that I would like to work on it. This way, no one else would try to do it at the same time as me.

screenshot of my comment

I attempted to follow the quickstart guide to start working on the bug, but I kept running into problems in the Command Line with pip, AKA the package installer for Python. I decided it was unnecessary to go through the process of downloading everything to test the issue locally since I was able to test the solution with the Firefox Inspector tool anyway. I played with the CSS rules and found a solution that didn’t require changing the site’s grid-flex hierarchy.

screenshot of my fix

Success!

I created a fork of the project with my fix and made a pull request on 03/19/24. Later the same day, I was invited to the repo and my pull request was accepted and merged into the main branch by Jack Gerrits.

screenshot of the approval comment

Conclusion

This was my first time contributing to an open-source project and I think it went well all things considered. I wish I could’ve gotten to run Autogen locally or through one of the tools the quickstart suggested, but I just didn’t have enough knowledge of Command Line or Python stuff to get it to work. This would’ve been nice not just for the bugfix, but also to play around with the whole product. However, I’m not sure I’ll contribute to this community again because of this issue and my general skepticism towards “open” AI.