What is Cascaide?
Cascaide is a lightweight Agent runtime and AI orchestration framework written in typescript designed to run anywhere JS/TS can. It is primarily built for web applications but works equally well for headless AI agents and workflows in Node/Bun.
What it really is is a distributed, observable, durable graph executor. Currently, the distribution is client/server, which is what gives rise to full stack angle. In future versions, we will support distributing the graph across more environments.
The name Cascaide comes from cascade, which is the most important primitive. A cascade is a series of node executions that “cascade” into the next.
Cascaide was built with developer experience at its core. As you read through the docs, you will see that you can accomplish a surprising amount of work with plain programmatic control. Complexity arises from composing simple primitives and the abstractions will feel familiar.
These are the reasons why you should try it
- Learn Fast - Simple, powerful abstractions you can learn over lunch
- Zero Orchestration Cost - No hosted runtime required. It runs wherever your app runs, so there’s nothing extra to pay for in production
- Build UI First - UI and human-in-the-loop support is natural, not an add on
- Build Fast - Single codebase, no context switching
- Debug Easily - Debugging and timetravel out of the box
- Deploy Anywhere - Deploy like any other application, no caveats
- Stay Light - Tiny codebase and bundle size, small enough to actually understand
UX Possibilities
Enables novel UX patterns beyond chatbots - smart components, ai workflow visualization, background agents as overlay, dynamic portalling of agents. Check out the UI/UX section for more.
What Can You Build With It?
You can build almost any Agent/AI Workflow you can think of. Cascaide spans full stack, so it provides UI and streaming support out of the box.
Check out our tutorials for more details and code.
- Multi Agent Systems - Supervisor architectures with agents collaborating
- Recursive Agents - Agents that spawn itself recursively to tackle large tasks efficiently.
- Human-in-the-Loop Workflows - Flows that treat humans as first class citizens
- Parallel Tools and Sub Agent Execution - Robust and easy to build
- RAG Agents - In cascaide, they really are not that different from normal agents
- Complex Branching Logic - Conditional flows basis agent decisions
If this sounds interesting, try our quickstart.
Acknowledgements
- Redux and RTK : We use it extensively under the hood. Massive respect for the team.
“The good news is that this means Redux can be used in many different ways. The bad news is that there are no helpers to make any of your code easier to write.” — Redux Toolkit documentation
- DBOS : We use their idea of durability through checkpointing in a database to achieve persistence.
- Pocketflow: The project that made me think maybe my idea isn’t entirely cuckoo.