docs/architecture/ms-framework-usage-report.md

Microsoft Agent Framework Usage Report

Date: 2025-12-06 Framework Version: agent-framework-core==1.0.0b251204

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What We Use From MS Framework (pip installed)

Core Classes

• BaseChatClient - Base class for chat clients
• ChatMessage, ChatRole - Message types
• ChatOptions - Request configuration
• ChatAgent - Agent base class

Decorators (Applied to HuggingFaceChatClient)

• @use_function_invocation - Enables tool/function calling
• @use_observability - Adds OTEL tracing hooks
• @use_chat_middleware - Enables middleware pipeline

Middleware Base Classes (Available but NOT yet used)

• ChatMiddleware - Intercepts chat client requests
• AgentMiddleware - Intercepts agent invocations
• FunctionMiddleware - Intercepts tool calls

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What We Hand-Roll (Custom Implementation)

Orchestration

• AdvancedOrchestrator - Main research workflow
• HierarchicalOrchestrator - Team-based orchestration
• SubIterationMiddleware - Team→judge loop (workflow, not middleware)

Clients

• HuggingFaceChatClient - Adapter for HuggingFace Inference API
• Client factory with auto-detection

Tools

• PubMedTool, ClinicalTrialsTool, EuropePMCTool
• SearchHandler - Scatter-gather orchestration

Services

• EmbeddingService - Local sentence-transformers
• LlamaIndexRAG - Premium OpenAI embeddings
• ResearchMemory - Research state management

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Gap Analysis

Component	MS Framework Has	DeepBoner Has	Status
Chat Middleware	ChatMiddleware base	Uses decorator only	SPEC-21
Retry Logic	N/A (left to user)	None	SPEC-21
Token Tracking	OTEL histograms	None	SPEC-21
Thread State	AgentThread serialization	ResearchMemory (no serialization)	P3
Observability	Full OTEL	structlog only	P3

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Recommendations

1. Implement RetryMiddleware using MS ChatMiddleware base class
2. Implement TokenTrackingMiddleware for cost visibility
3. Rename src/middleware/ to avoid confusion with MS patterns

See SPEC-21 for implementation details.