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Introduction
AI agents are rapidly becoming essential for building intelligent applications, but creating robust, adaptable agents that scale across domains remains a challenge. Many existing frameworks struggle with brittleness, tool misuse, and failures when faced with complex workflows.
CUGA (Configurable Generalist Agent) was designed to overcome these limitations. It's an open-source, AI Agent that combines flexibility, reliability, and ease of use for enterprise use cases. By abstracting orchestration complexity, CUGA empowers developers to focus on domain requirements rather than the internals of agent building. And now, with its integration into 🚀Hugging Face Spaces🚀, experimenting with CUGA and open models has never been easier.
What is CUGA?
CUGA is a configurable, general-purpose AI agent that supports complex, multi-step tasks across web and API environments. It has achieved state-of-the-art performance on leading benchmarks:
🥇 #1 on AppWorld - a benchmark with 750 real-world tasks across 457 APIs
🥈 Top-tier on WebArena (#1 from 02/25 - 09/25) - showcases CUGA Computer Use capabilities with a complex benchmark for autonomous web agents across application domains
At its core, CUGA offers:
- High-performing generalist agent: Benchmarked on complex web and API tasks, it combines best-of-breed agentic patterns (e.g. planner-executor, code-act) with structured planning and smart variable management to prevent hallucination and handle complexity
- Configurable reasoning modes: Balance performance and cost/latency with flexible modes ranging from fast heuristics to deep planning, optimizing for your task requirements
- Computer use: Effortlessly combine UI interactions with API invocations in a workflow
- Multi-tool integration: Seamlessly integrate tools via OpenAPI specs, MCP servers, and LangChain, enabling rapid connection to REST APIs, custom protocols, and Python functions
- Integrates with Langflow: A low-code visual build experience for designing and deploying agent workflows without extensive coding
- Composable: CUGA can be exposed as a tool to other agents, enabling nested reasoning and multi-agent collaboration
We're also continuing to innovate with new experimental capabilities, including:
- Configurable policy and human-in-the-loop instructions: Improve alignment and ensure safe agent behavior in enterprise contexts
- Save-and-reuse capabilities: Capture and reuse successful execution paths (plans, code, and trajectories) for faster and consistent behavior across repeated tasks.
Figure 1: CUGA Agentic Architecture
The CUGA architecture begins with the user's message flowing into a chat layer that interprets intent and constructs the user's goal, based on context. A task planning and control component then decomposes this goal into structured subtasks, tracked programmatically through a dynamic task ledger. This ledger supports re-planning when needed, ensuring robust execution. Subtasks are delegated to specialized agents, such as the API agent, which uses an inner reasoning loop to generate pseudo-code instructions before invoking code in a secure sandbox. The system leverages a tool registry that goes beyond MCP protocols to parse and understand tool capabilities, enabling precise orchestration. Once all steps are completed, the final response is returned to the user, delivering reliable, policy-aligned outcomes.
CUGA works best when inference is fast. When each call takes seconds, delays compound and force a tradeoff between agent capability and user experience. Running on high-performance inference platforms like Groq shows how fast inference fundamentally expands what agent architectures can achieve.
Open Source and Open Models
CUGA is fully open source, under the Apache 2.0 license, and you can find us at cuga.dev.
By embracing open models, CUGA aligns with the Hugging Face ethos of democratizing AI-giving developers the freedom to choose models that best fit their needs, whether for experimentation or production.
CUGA has been tested with a variety of open models, including gpt-oss-120b and Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct-fp8 (both hosted on Groq). Our Hugging Face Space uses gpt-oss-120b, with the model hosted on Groq, offering a rapid response time for LLM calls
Groq runs open models on its custom‑built LPUs, which are designed for AI inference and optimal for repeated agent inferences required by CUGA's architecture, enabling planning, execution, and validation steps to finish fast. The result is strong cost and performance: open models are ~80-90% cheaper than closed alternatives; Groq's OpenAI-compatible APIs meet production latency needs, and CUGA stays fully configurable across models, providers, and deployment topologies.
Integration with Langflow: Visual Agent Design Made Simple
To make agent development even more accessible, CUGA integrates with Langflow, an open-source visual programming interface for building LLM-powered workflows. Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface reduces the barrier to entry for those who prefer low-code solutions.
Starting with Langflow 1.7.0, CUGA ships with its own widget, enabling users to assemble complex, multi-tool agents visually and deploy with a click. Give it a try at langflow.org.
Try the Hugging Face Demo: A Hands-On Preview
We've launched a CUGA demo on Hugging Face Spaces to give you a taste of what's possible. This demo showcases a small CRM system and equips CUGA with 20 preconfigured tools for handling sales related data queries and API interactions through the API Agent. To make experimentation even more powerful, the demo provides access to workspace files, enabling you to use predefined policies.
Give it a try on Hugging Face Spaces and share your feedback!
Conclusion and Call to Action
CUGA brings a new level of flexibility and openness to AI agent building. To engage with us:
Instagram Engineering
Shopify Engineering