Introducing DigitalOcean Gradient™ AI Agent Development Kit: A code-first way to build production-ready AI agents

Introducing DigitalOcean Gradient™ AI Agent Development Kit: A code-first way to build production-ready AI agents Why we built the ADK What’s included in the public preview Try the Agent Development Kit today About the author Try DigitalOcean for free Related Articles A More Powerful, Code-First Knowledge Base Experience on the DigitalOcean Gradient™ AI Platform Now Available: Remote MCP for DigitalOcean Services DigitalOcean MCP Server is now available By Grace Morgan Updated: December 17, 2025 3 min read Developers everywhere face a common challenge: it’s getting easier and easier to prototype an AI agent, but harder to turn that prototype into something reliable, testable, and ready for production. Orchestrating LLM interactions, managing state, wiring up function calling, integrating multiple tools, evaluating performance, tracing failures, and deploying to production often require complex custom code and scattered tooling. The DigitalOcean Gradient™ AI Agent Development Kit (ADK) , now available in public preview , is designed to solve exactly that problem. It’s a powerful, code-first SDK that lets you build, test, and deploy sophisticated multi-step agent workflows from within their existing development environments, with built-in support for evaluations, traceability, and knowledge bases. To see the ADK in action and for help getting started, check out our tutorial. Most AI frameworks solve the “day-one” problem: how to create a working agent. But they fall short on the “day-two” problem: how to operate that agent in production. We built the ADK to give you a standardized, production-grade framework that handles the full lifecycle: Orchestration: Build multi-step workflows without boilerplate State management: Keep track of what your agent is doing across steps Tool integration: Register custom functions/APIs as first-class tools Knowledge base support: Connect agents to your existing DO Knowledge Bases Evaluations: Measure correctness, security, tone, and retrieval quality Tracing: Understand how your agent behaves at every span and step Deployment: Ship your entire agent system, from logic to KBs to tools, with one command The result is a code-first experience that lets you move from local development → observability → evaluation → deployment in a single, consistent workflow. Our goal is to provide a strong foundation for developers to build, test, and deploy AI agent workflows directly from their development environment. In the private preview, you could leverage the core SDK framework with CRUD APIs, connect models, organize projects in workspaces, use the entry point decorator and CLI, and take advantage of MCP support on the Agent Platform. Building on this foundation, the public preview introduces a set of powerful new features to help you run production-level workflows more efficiently and with deeper visibility: Traces & Insights for Any Workflow : Add full tracing to your agent logic using custom decorators, even without LangGraph. Spans, steps, and KB interactions appear in the Gradient AI Platform UI, helping you understand your agent’s behavior at every step.