Hermetic

Hermetic is a library that makes it easy to develop, test, evaluate and deploy LLM Applications.

Note: Hermetic is still experimental. In particular the APIs may change as we learn more about what works or doesn't.

Quick start guide

These particular instructions are focused on Anyscale Endpoints, but they should generalize.

Prerequisites

Before you get started, you’ll need an Anyscale Endpoints key. You can get that from https://console.endpoints.anyscale.com/credentials (after you’ve entered your credit card).

Make sure you save this – it is only given once.

You also need a clean python environment.

Install Hermetic, Langchain, Gradio, OpenAI libraries

To install these libraries, just install hermetic and hermetic will install the rest. Update pip first, since it seems to reduce installation time.

% python -m pip install --upgrade pip
% pip install git+https://github.com/anyscale/hermetic.git

Create a .env file and put some environment variables in it

We need quite a few environment variables to get this demo working, so the easiest way is to put them in a .env file.

Add the following lines there:

export OPENAI_API_BASE=https://console.endpoints.anyscale.com/m/v1
export OPENAI_API_KEY=secret_<your secret> 

NOTE:It may seem weird that we are defining OPENAI_API_* variables when we want to connect to Anyscale. But this is because Anyscale offers an OpenAI compatible api. Note that you did not need to install any libraries to use Anyscale Endpoints specifically, it reuses the OpenAI python SDK.

And now to load them:

% source .env

Create a system prompt

Now create a simple file

resources/prompts/system_msg.txt

That contains:

You are helpful assistant who is also a pirate and speaks like a pirate. You litter your conversation with references to pirates. You also enjoy the humor of Monty Python and include many references to Monty Python sketches in your answers.  

Create a Langchain-based agent that uses Anyscale Endpoints

Create a file called pirate_langchain.py that contains the following (or just copy from here):

from langchain.chat_models import ChatOpenAI
from langchain.schema import HumanMessage, SystemMessage

from hermetic.agents.langchain_chat_agent import LangchainChatAgent
from hermetic.core.environment import Environment
from hermetic.core.prompt_mgr import PromptMgr
from hermetic.presenters.gradio_presenter import GradioPresenter

NAME = 'pirate'
MODEL = 'meta-llama/Llama-2-7b-chat-hf'

class Pirate(LangchainChatAgent):

    def __init__(self, env):
        # Call the super class constructor
        super().__init__(environment = env, id=NAME)
        env.add_agent(NAME, self)
        self.pm = self.env.prompt_mgr
        
        # bind to the system message
        sys_msg = self.pm.bind('system_msg')

        # Temperature set to 0.001 rather than 0 to deal with Endpoint bug. 
        self.llm = ChatOpenAI(temperature=0.001, model_name=MODEL, streaming=True)

        # Let's add our system message to the message history
        self.message_history = [SystemMessage(content=sys_msg.render())]

    # Our superclass takes care of the details, all we need to do
    # is to update the message history
    def update_message_history(self, inp): 
        # If we wanted we could add additional details here. 
        self.message_history.append(HumanMessage(content=inp))



# Now let's set up the enviroment and presenter
env = Environment(store = None, prompt_mgr = PromptMgr(hot_reload=True))

# Let's add our agent to the environment
pirate = Pirate(env)
env.set_primary_agent(NAME)

# Now present graphically. 

presenter = GradioPresenter(app_name='Pirate', 
                            env=env)

# This starts the UI. 
presenter.present()

Let's run it!

% python pirate_langchain.py

Now connect to localhost:7860 in your browser and you should be able to talk to a pirate!

Deep dive

Core concepts

Agent: An agent is code that processes user input. It's a superset of LLM chains and Langchain Agents.

Environment: Agents run in an environment. The environment includes prompts, any memory beyond that for the current conversation, agents and tools.

Tool: A tool is a connection to an online service that offers an API.

Presenter: A presenter is something that takes an agent and connects it to a source of input. Examples include GradioPresenter, StdioPresenter, SlackPresenter and EvalPresenter.

Hermetic is an approach to LLM development and deployment. It builds on a few key principles:

1. Agents should be separated from their environment and presenter. This maximizes reusability and testability.
2. Agents should do only one thing.
3. By creating different environments containing the same agents, we can do effective evaluations.
4. You should be able to deploy an environment and everything in it into production.

When we do things in this way, we can simplify the testing, evaluation and comparison process. We can set up our environment as a test environment or a production environment, we can re-use our models across different modalities and presentations.