Make AgentChat Components Support Declarative Specifications.

[victordibia]

What

Currently components in AgentChat dont have a built-in declarative loading or serialization.
This issue is meant to help discuss and architect a setup where all components can be easily serialized to some declarative spec and runtime objects loaded/instantiated from a declarative spec.

Tasks

• Support declarative configs for TerminationCondition #4983
• Support declarative configs for BaseChatAgents (and derivatives) - UserProxy, AssistantAgent, WebSurferAgent #5032
• Support declarative configurations for FunctionTools #5036
• Support declarative configs for BaseGroupChat (and derivatives) - RoundRobinGroupChat, SelectorGroupChat, MagenticOne etc #5064
• Update component config and other parts of AGS to use native declarative specs

Benefits

• Native serialization of component specs
• Consistency across all applications using the component spec
• Responsibility for correctly instantiating and serializing a component is solely held by the developer of the component. As it rightfully should be (apps like AGS should do the bare minimum )
• The process for creating component specifications is not both consistent and simplified for all applications.
• The developer experience is greatly improved - easy switching between declarative and python code (a common ask).
  • Create your agentchat team in python code, prototype,
  • Team.dict() .. save to team.yaml or team.json for distribution/deployment/debugging in AGS (with a single command)

How to run team_a in AutoGen studio?

autogenstudio ui --config-dir=configs

Note that this is only focused on serialization - how to return a runtime instance of a component from a declaritive spec and how to obtain that declarative spec from an instance. Now the ability to load/save runtime state is a separate task tracked in #4100 .

Update: Implementation with Component Config

This effort will now build on the collaboratively designed ComponentConfig introduced in core

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Related to #3624, #4388
Thoughts welcome @husseinmozannar @ekzhu @afourney @gagb @jackgerrits