Build real agentic apps using CUGA: two dozen working examples on a lightweight harness

Hugging Face build real agentic apps using CUGA: two dozen working examples on a lightweight harness

We built two-dozen single-file apps to prove it. Read one end to end here, then see how the same agent runs sovereign and governed in production without a rewrite. Most agentic apps start with a week of plumbing before the agent does anything useful. You pick a framework, wire up a model client, write tool adapters, build some way to stream state to a UI, and somewhere in there you also decide what the agent is actually for. The interesting part arrives last. CUGA inverts that. It’s the open-source agent harness from IBM that handles the planning, the execution loop, the tool calls, and the state plumbing for you. What’s left is the part that’s actually yours: which tools the agent can reach, and what you tell it to do. To show what that feels like in practice, we built cuga-apps: two dozen small, working apps, each a single FastAPI file wrapping one CugaAgent, from a movie recommender to an IBM Cloud architecture advisor. They exist to be read and copied. You can click through the live gallery. This article walks through one of them, names what the harness takes off your plate, and shows where the same code goes when you need it governed for production. No new framework to learn first. If you’ve written a FastAPI route, you can read every line. The fair question to ask of anything in this space is what it saves you from writing.