Unleashing the Power of AI Agents with Koog
18 Jun 2025Koog is an innovative, open-source agentic framework built by JetBrains. It empowers Kotlin developers to create and run AI agents entirely within the JVM ecosystem, leveraging a modern Kotlin DSL. This means you can build intelligent, autonomous agents with the same ease and productivity that Kotlin brings to everyday development.
The Benefits of Koog for Your AI Agentic Projects
Koog offers a compelling set of features and advantages that make it an excellent choice for anyone looking to dive into AI agent development with Kotlin:
- Pure Kotlin Implementation: Build and run your AI agents entirely in idiomatic Kotlin. This means leveraging all the benefits of Kotlin – conciseness, null safety, and excellent tooling – for your AI projects.
- Modular Feature System: Extend your agent’s capabilities through a highly composable feature system. This allows for flexible and scalable agent design.
- Tool Integration: Koog allows you to create and integrate custom tools, giving your agents access to external systems and resources. This is crucial for agents that need to interact with the real world or specific APIs.
- Powerful Streaming API: Process responses from Large Language Models (LLMs) in real-time. This is essential for responsive user interfaces and efficient handling of large outputs. It even supports invoking multiple tools on the fly from a single LLM request.
- Intelligent History Compression: Optimize token usage while maintaining conversation context through various pre-built strategies. This helps manage costs and improves efficiency when dealing with long conversations.
- Persistent Agent Memory: Enable knowledge retention across different sessions and even between different agents, leading to more robust and capable AI.
- Comprehensive Tracing: Debug and monitor agent execution with detailed and configurable tracing of LLM calls, tools, and agent stages. This provides invaluable insight into your agent’s behavior.
- Support for Various LLM Providers: Koog integrates with popular LLM providers like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, and Ollama, giving you flexibility in choosing your underlying AI models.
My Experience with Koog
As someone who is currently working on an AI agentic project and, honestly, without previous AI code experience, I can confidently say that Koog (version 0.2.1) is super good for it. The framework’s design is incredibly intuitive, making it easy to grasp the core concepts of building AI agents. The clear documentation and the idiomatic Kotlin approach meant that I could quickly get started and see tangible results. The ability to integrate tools and design complex workflows without getting bogged down in low-level AI complexities has been a game-changer for my project.
Conclusion
Koog is truly a game-changer for Kotlin developers venturing into the exciting field of AI agents. Its pure Kotlin implementation, comprehensive features, and developer-friendly design make it an exceptionally powerful and enjoyable framework to work with. It’s clear that JetBrains has put a lot of thought into making AI agent development accessible and efficient. Even for someone like me, who previously lacked extensive AI coding experience, Koog has proven to be incredibly easy to work with and an excellent foundation for building sophisticated AI agentic projects. If you’re a Kotlin developer looking to build AI agents, I highly recommend giving Koog a try – you won’t be disappointed!