Registry

Registry

The registry (src/registry/) is TinyAgents' named capability catalog — the third of the five surfaces in the Architecture. It is the piece that makes recursion resolvable: every model, tool, graph, router, and reducer is registered under a name, and the declarative .rag and imperative .ragsh languages bind to those names rather than to Rust types. That indirection is exactly what lets a model spawn a sub-agent or sub-graph it never hardcoded — it references a name, and the registry resolves it to a real, allow-listed capability. See Recursion and RLM.

The registry is deliberately explicit. It is not a hidden global runtime: you own one per application, test, tenant, workspace, or server. It does not execute graph nodes or call providers — it answers "which capabilities exist, under what names, and is this name allowed?"

What the registry holds

The implemented core has three submodules:

• registry::component — identity and discovery types.
• registry::capability — the name-addressable CapabilityRegistry.
• registry::catalog — the offline model catalog (prices, context windows, capabilities).

Component identity (registry::component)

Three types describe what a registered capability is, independent of any live handle (they serialize, diff, and render in a UI long after the registering process exits):

• ComponentId(String) — a stable, durable identifier. It is a newtype over the registered name (e.g. "gpt-4o", "lookup_user"), not a Rust type path, so a capability survives module moves, renames, and serialization.

• ComponentKind — the kind that partitions the namespace. Lookups, duplicate detection, aliasing, and discovery are all scoped by kind, so (Model, "x") and (Tool, "x") are independent entries. Variants:

  Kind	Stores	Status
  Model	Arc<dyn ChatModel<State>>	executable handle
  Tool	Arc<dyn Tool<State>>	executable handle
  Graph	Blueprint (a .rag graph)	serializable value
  Agent	Arc<dyn HarnessAgent>	executable handle
  Router	name-only descriptor	presence only
  Reducer	name-only descriptor	presence only
  Store	name-only descriptor	reserved

• ComponentMetadata { id, kind, description, tags, aliases } — discovery / UI metadata. Every registration records one (even name-only ones, where the description and tags start empty); it is the source of truth for presence.

The broader registry spec (docs/modules/registry/README.md) anticipates first-class stores, middleware, listeners, and an event bus. Today the Store kind is a reserved name-only kind and the rest live in the harness; document and use what exists. (Agent, by contrast, is now an executable kind — see below.)

The capability registry (registry::capability)

CapabilityRegistry<State = ()> is the name-addressable catalog. It is generic over the application State because models and tools are generic over it; State = () is the common stateless default. Storage is partitioned by kind: models, tools, and executable agents keep live handles, graphs keep a serializable Blueprint, and routers/reducers (plus the reserved store kind) are name-only descriptors. (Agents are state-decoupled — they receive a mapped prompt, not the registry's State — so the agent map is independent of the State generic.) The meta map — keyed by (kind, canonical name) — is the uniform presence index behind has and names.

It is intentionally distinct from the harness' per-run ModelRegistry and ToolRegistry (which are executable stores). The CapabilityRegistry is the catalog that declarative source is validated against.

Registering capabilities:

let mut reg = CapabilityRegistry::<()>::new();
reg.register_model("gpt-4o", model)?;     // duplicate name -> error
reg.register_tool(tool)?;                  // keyed by Tool::name()
reg.register_graph_blueprint("triage", blueprint)?;
reg.register_agent(agent)?;                // keyed by HarnessAgent::name()
reg.register_router("route_by_intent")?;   // name-only descriptor
reg.register_reducer("append_messages")?;  // name-only descriptor
reg.alias(ComponentKind::Model, "fast", "gpt-4o")?;

• register_* fails with TinyAgentsError::DuplicateComponent if the (kind, name) pair already exists; the replace_* variants (replace_model / replace_tool / replace_graph_blueprint / replace_agent) overwrite while preserving any richer metadata already attached.
• register_agent(agent) registers an executable Arc<dyn HarnessAgent> keyed by its own name(); a SubAgentNode resolves it (via agent(name), below) to delegate a graph step to a model-driven agent loop.
• register_descriptor(kind, name) backs the name-only kinds and is exposed for the reserved Store kind.
• alias(kind, alias, target) declares an alternate name; it validates the target exists and the alias is free, then records the alias on the target's metadata for discovery.

Looking things up:

model(name), tool(name), graph_blueprint(name), and agent(name) resolve a name or one alias hop to a live handle/blueprint via resolve_name. has(kind, name) answers presence, names(kind) lists canonical names (sorted), and names_including_aliases(kind) lists canonical names and aliases — the exact set declarative source may reference. metadata(kind, name) returns the ComponentMetadata.

Handing off to the runtime:

• to_model_registry() builds a harness ModelRegistry from the registered models, binding alias names to the same handle.
• to_tool_registry() builds a harness ToolRegistry (tools are keyed by their own schema Tool::name(), so tool-level aliases are intentionally not propagated — a tool is always invoked under its canonical name).
• capability_resolver() builds the language layer's CapabilityResolver — the bridge described below.

Binding .rag / .ragsh capabilities by name

This is the registry's reason to exist. CapabilityResolver::from_registry(reg) (in language::compiler) snapshots names_including_aliases for every kind into allow-lists:

Self {
    models:    reg.names_including_aliases(Model),
    tools:     reg.names_including_aliases(Tool),
    subgraphs: reg.names_including_aliases(Graph),
    routers:   reg.names_including_aliases(Router),
    reducers:  reg.names_including_aliases(Reducer),
    node_kinds: DEFAULT_NODE_KINDS, // model, tool, ...
}

When a .rag blueprint or a .ragsh program names a model, tool, subgraph, router, or reducer, the compiler checks it against these allow-lists (bind_blueprint, bind_capabilities_with_registry). An unknown reference is a compile error — before anything runs. This is what makes agent-authored source safe: a model can emit a .rag blueprint, but it can only wire together capabilities a human already registered and allowed. Because graphs are registered as Graph components, a blueprint can reference another blueprint by name as a subgraph — the registry is where graph-runs-graph recursion gets its names. The resolver also supports incremental allow_model / allow_tool / allow_subgraph / allow_router / allow_reducer extensions for tests and controlled escalation.

flowchart LR
    Rust[Rust: register_* by name] --> Reg[CapabilityRegistry]
    Reg -->|names_including_aliases| Res[CapabilityResolver]
    Rag[".rag / .ragsh source"] -->|references names| Res
    Res -->|validated| Graph[Graph + Harness runtime]

Loading

The model catalog (registry::catalog)

The model catalog is an offline snapshot of provider model metadata — not a live source of truth. It gives TinyAgents deterministic behavior for cost estimates, context-window checks, capability discovery, model-picker UIs, tests, and request validation before a provider call. A checked-in seed snapshot (docs/modules/registry/model-catalog.snapshot.json) is compiled into the crate.

• ModelCatalog::seed() loads the bundled snapshot; from_json / from_snapshot load a custom one. get(provider, model_id) and get_by_model_id(model_id) resolve an entry by exact id or alias; snapshot() exposes the raw ModelCatalogSnapshot and models() the full entry slice.
• ModelCatalogSnapshot carries schema_version, snapshot_id, created_at, currency, unit, an optional description, provenance sources (name / url / retrieved_at), and the models list.
• ModelCatalogEntry describes one model: provider, model_id, aliases, mode, max_input_tokens / max_output_tokens, optional deprecation_date, pricing, capabilities, a source identifier with optional source_url, and a raw JSON Value that preserves the upstream payload verbatim for fields not modeled above.
• ModelPricing gives per-token input/output prices plus cache-read, cache-creation, audio, and reasoning rates.
• ModelCapabilities is the feature matrix: streaming, tool_calling, parallel_tool_calling, json_schema, system_messages, vision, audio_input / audio_output, pdf_input, prompt_caching, reasoning.

The catalog is metadata only — it never calls a provider. See Providers for the live model surface and docs/modules/registry/model-catalog.md for snapshot provenance rules.

When to use the registry

Use a CapabilityRegistry whenever capabilities must be referenced by name: to compile and validate .rag blueprints or .ragsh programs, to let one agent or graph spawn another it did not hardcode, to power a discovery UI over available models/tools/graphs, or to hand a curated, allow-listed set of models and tools to a harness. Use the model catalog whenever you need offline cost or capability facts about a model without a network call.

See also

• Architecture — the five surfaces and how they compose.
• Graph Runtime — what registered Graph blueprints become.
• Recursion and RLM — name-binding as the substrate for self-authoring and sub-agent/sub-graph recursion.
• Module spec: docs/modules/registry/README.md, design.md, model-catalog.md.