Chapter 5: Knowledge, RAG, and Tools
April 13, 2026 ยท View on GitHub
Welcome to Chapter 5: Knowledge, RAG, and Tools. In this part of Agno Tutorial: Multi-Agent Systems That Learn Over Time, you will build an intuitive mental model first, then move into concrete implementation details and practical production tradeoffs.
Agno agents combine tool execution and knowledge retrieval to produce grounded, high-utility outputs.
Augmentation Surfaces
| Surface | Value |
|---|---|
| vector/RAG retrieval | domain grounding |
| toolkits | external action and system interaction |
| guardrails | safe execution boundaries |
Operational Rules
- treat tool calls as policy-governed actions
- track retrieval quality and stale context rates
- ensure typed contracts for tool inputs/outputs
Source References
Summary
You now understand how to combine knowledge and tool layers in Agno without sacrificing reliability.
Next: Chapter 6: AgentOS Runtime and Control Plane
Source Code Walkthrough
libs/agno/agno/knowledge/ and libs/agno/agno/tools/
Knowledge and RAG capabilities live in libs/agno/agno/knowledge/, while tool integrations are in libs/agno/agno/tools/. The AgnoKnowledge base class shows how documents are chunked, embedded, and searched. Browsing the tools directory reveals how Agno wraps external APIs and services as callable tools for agents.