Skip to content
repository radar
Agents & Orchestration

🛠️Agent Lightning

ACTIVE BREAKOUT

microsoft/agent-lightning · homepage ↗

The absolute trainer to light up AI agents.

⭐ Very popular: 17k stars, gaining about 17 a week

View on GitHub ↗

repo profile

vintage 2025 1 year old
language Python
license MIT

momentum

total stars 17k
stars added last week +17
HN peak 98 pts 9mo ago
used by 54 repos & packages
commits / week 0 steady · +0% vs prior mo
issues closed 40% ~4d to close, median
contributors 32 (+1 in 15d)
release cadence fortnightly
last activity 2d ago

durability

backing company-owned Microsoft
openness permissive

since we covered it

monthly average + 2k/mo (+56%/mo) · + 15k total since PR#20

why it's a big deal

  • It lets teams train and optimize existing AI agents without rewriting them, by wrapping current code in lightweight helper calls instead of porting to a new framework.
  • It works across LangChain, OpenAI Agent SDK, AutoGen, CrewAI, Microsoft Agent Framework, or plain Python OpenAI calls, so the training layer is not tied to one agent stack.
  • It supports reinforcement learning, automatic prompt optimization, and supervised fine-tuning, and can optimize individual agents inside a multi-agent system.

under the hood

  • It is primarily Python, with a TypeScript dashboard UI making up roughly 15 percent of the codebase.
  • A tracer collects prompts, tool calls, and rewards as structured spans that flow into a central LightningStore, which keeps tasks, resources, and traces in sync.
  • A Trainer streams datasets and moves resources between the store and the chosen algorithm, which reads spans and posts updated resources such as refined prompt templates or new policy weights back to the inference engine.

Radar summary, generated from the project's public sources

star history

PR#20 · 3k17k now Jun 2025Aug 2026
  1. PR#20 3k 2025-10-29
  2. now 17k + 15k since first covered

curve is sampled from GitHub's star history, plus our own daily readings since we covered it; the dashed stretch is before we first covered it, the solid line since. figures at coverage are the numbers we printed then (approx.), current count is live.

understory

Better known than its recent output, coasting a little on attention.

-47 understory score output 8 · clout 55
Aug 2025 Jul 2026
  • output, commits & releases
  • clout, star velocity

output = commits & releases; clout = star velocity, both 0 to 100 monthly indices; the gap where output runs above clout is the understory. The understory →

covered in

  • PR#20 2025-10-29 below the radar

    Train any AI agent with reinforcement learning

similar projects

compare these →
  • 📖 ai-agent-book

    2.2× the stars

    AI Agent PDF

    38k ACTIVE
  • 🧠 MaxKB

    GPL-3.0 licensed

    🔥 MaxKB is an open-source platform for building enterprise-grade agents.

    23k ACTIVE
  • 🎨 ART

    Agent Reinforcement Trainer: train multi-step agents for real-world tasks using GRPO. Give your agents on-the-job training. Reinforcement learning for Qwen3.6, GPT-OSS, Llama, and more!

    11k ACTIVE

comments

Sign in with GitHub to add your blip on Agent Lightning.

loading comments…