WASM Agents: AI agents running in the browser

Summary

One of the main barriers to a wider adoption and experimentation with open-source agents is the dependency on extra tools and frameworks that need to be installed before the agents can be run. In this post, we introduce the Wasm agents blueprint, aimed at showing how to write agents as HTML files, which can just be opened and run in a browser, without the need for any extra dependencies. This is still an experimental project, but we chose to share it early so that people can both test its capabilities and build new applications based on it.Why?While developing our agent-factory tool, we have been wondering about ways to package an agent so it could be easily shared and executed on different systems. In the past, we addressed a similar problem with marimo, both when trying to convey our thoughts with code examples and when introducing new tools for algorithmic timelines. In both cases, the main advantage was that people could run code directly on their devices, more precisely inside their own browsers, thanks to the possibility of exporting marimo notebooks as standalone HTML files powered by WebAssembly and Pyodide.WebAssembly (Wasm) is a binary instruction format that allows code written in languages like C, C++, Rust, and Python to run at near-native speed in web browsers. Pyodide is a Python distribution for the browser that runs entirely in WebAssembly, enabling you to execute Python code and many of its libraries directly in web applications. As most of our agentic code is in Python, it was quite natural for us to think about adopting a similar solution: the result is a collection of simple, single-file agents that run in a browser tab, in an environment that is sandboxed by construction, and without the need to manually install extra libraries or development frameworks.How it worksAll our demos are standalone HTML files, which contain both the UI and the running code of an agent. If you look at their source code, you will see three calls to the pyodide.runPyth...