Rust-native coding-agent runtime

bigfish — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:11:45 +0000

Today I finished the implementation of pi-rust. Now I want to share how to build an AI agent.

From my perspective, the core of an agent is the agent loop. The flow looks like this:

Read steering messages
        ↓
Call the model
        ↓
Get assistant message
        ↓
Check for tool calls
        ├─ No: check whether to stop
        └─ Yes: execute tools
                ↓
           Write tool result
                ↓
           Call the model again

A simplified version of the code looks like this:

while has_more_tool_calls || !pending_messages.is_empty() {
    // 1. Inject steering/follow-up messages

    // 2. Call the model and get the assistant response
    let message = stream_assistant_response(...).await?;

    // 3. Check stop_reason
    if message.stop_reason == StopReason::Error {
        ...
    }

    // 4. Extract tool calls from the assistant message
    let tool_calls = message.content.iter()
        .filter_map(|content| match content {
            Content::ToolCall(tool_call) => Some(tool_call.clone()),
            _ => None,
        })
        .collect();

    // 5. Execute tools
    let batch = execute_tool_calls(...).await?;

    // 6. Add ToolResultMessage back to the context
    current_context.messages.push(...);

    // 7. Decide whether to continue to the next round
}

Another question arises: how do we parse messages from different providers, such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and other completion protocols? The response is streamed, so we need to process it in a special way.

while let Some(event) = response.next().await {
    match &event {
        AssistantMessageEvent::Start { partial } => { ... }

        AssistantMessageEvent::TextDelta { partial, .. } => { ... }

        AssistantMessageEvent::ThinkingDelta { partial, .. } => { ... }

        AssistantMessageEvent::ToolCallDelta { partial, .. } => { ... }

        AssistantMessageEvent::Done { .. }
        | AssistantMessageEvent::Error { .. } => { ... }
    }
}

The streamed message sequence can look like this:

Start
  ↓
TextStart
  ↓
TextDelta
  ↓
TextDelta
  ↓
ToolCallStart
  ↓
ToolCallDelta
  ↓
Done

That's the core idea behind pi-rust: keep the agent loop simple, and normalize provider-specific streaming events into one consistent event model.

If you're building something similar, I'd love to hear how you handle provider differences and streaming tool calls.

DEV Community: bigfish

Rust-native coding-agent runtime