Show HN: Budibase Agents Beta – model-agnostic AI agents for internal workflows

https://budibase.com/blog/updates/ai-agents-beta/

5•mjashanks•3h ago

Hi there, Mike here from Budibase.

We’ve recently launched AI Agents into Beta, alongside our existing open-source app-building and automation tools.

We built Budibase Agents for teams that want to leverage AI within real-world workflows, using their own LLMs, data, and APIs. Because of this, our Agents can be powered by any LLM with an OpenAI-compatible API, including open-source and locally-hosted models. This means you can build Agents that connect to your existing toolstack, within your own environment.

Some more details:

- Agents' behavior is configured using natural language instructions, within existing Budibase Workspaces.

- You explicitly control which data sources, APIs, and automations an agent can access.

- End-users can interact with your agents via Budibase Chat, or using existing chat tools like Slack and Discord.

- Agents can be called from Automations, and vice versa, enabling complex workflows, including interacting with end-user apps for manual human approvals.

The Budibase Agents Beta is available now for all self-hosted and cloud users.

As this is a Beta release, we’re actively looking for input and feedback on how we can improve Agents, in terms of experience and functionality for building using AI within real-life workflows.

Feel free to let us know via our GitHub Discussions: https://github.com/budibase/budibase/discussions

Comments

sneg55•2h ago

The model-agnostic approach is smart. Most teams I know are stuck between "we want AI" and "we can't send data to OpenAI." Being able to plug in local models while keeping the same workflow layer is the right call.

Curious how you handle tool permissions in practice. Is it just a whitelist, or can you scope down to specific rows/fields?

mjashanks•2h ago

At the moment any tool that you write inline in your instructions - the agent has access to use.

The way to scope down access, would be to use an Automation (our RPA, zapier-like section). You can give an automation parameters and control exactly what it does, then use it as an agent tool.

In future, we'll be looking into user-delegate permissions. I.e. you give your users a role (RBAC) in Budibase, which gives them access to certain resources. Any agent calls will be done under the user's permissions. This is not always desirable - sometimes you want your agent to have more permissions that the user - so this will need to be configurable at some level.