Learning Tactus
A coherent introduction: the why, the mental model, and the core patterns.
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Deep-dive articles that explain how to give agents tools, keep them safe with guardrails, and measure their reliability.
Guiding Principles
Tactus is opinionated on purpose: close the loop with verifiable iteration, shift left to catch errors early, and use layered guardrails so agents can do real work safely.
The Tactus Book Series
Three complementary books: learn the patterns, dive into the reference, or keep the cheat sheet on your desk.
The AI Engineer’s Toolbox
A marketing-forward perspective on tool design: schema-first capabilities, inspectable tool calls, deterministic orchestration, and staged access.
Guardrails for Agent Autonomy
Tactus gives you levers of control at every level: capability, context, network, and human oversight. You don't hope for safety—you engineer it.
Validation
Procedures declare typed inputs and outputs, validated with Pydantic. This isn't just decoration: it's a contract that guarantees type safety at the edges of your agentic workflows.
Model Primitive
A stateless prediction interface for training, inference, and evaluation. Clean contracts, versioned models, and reliable outputs.
Agent Primitive
A stateful, tool-using runtime for multi-turn reasoning. Guardrails turn autonomy into shippable behavior.
Videos
Watch the story: visuals + narration that mirror the articles.
Why constraints enable autonomy: staged tools, human gates, and a secretless broker boundary (so there’s nothing in the runtime to steal).
Sandboxing & Isolation
Agents run in a Lua sandbox inside a networkless container, constraining what they can touch and firewalling side effects. Privileged operations are brokered by a separate process that holds the secrets. It’s like letting a burglar into an empty building: even if the agent is compromised, there’s nothing valuable inside to steal—and nowhere to send it.
Why do we need a new language?
We have Python. We have TypeScript. We have powerful agent frameworks. But they were built to manipulate deterministic logic, not probabilistic behavior.
Why a New Language? (7 min)
Behavior Specifications
Tactus treats behavior specs as part of the language itself: inline with procedures, executable by the runtime, and tied directly to evaluations so reliability stays visible as your system changes.
Evaluations
One successful run is luck. Reliability is a statistic. Evaluations let you measure accuracy, cost, and reliability performance across datasets so you can ship with confidence.