This page is a quick overview of the features within Honcho. In-depth guides are available for each feature in the Spellbooks - Design Patterns section.

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Local vs Global Representation

Peers in Honcho are abstract entities that can represent humans, agents, or NPCs. Honcho has a two-layer approach to forming representations of Peers.
  • Global Representation: Representation owned by a Peer that is constructed from everything the Peer has sent within Honcho.
  • Local Representation: The representation that a Peer forms of other Peers, based on the messages those other Peers have sent (as observed by the Peer forming the representation).
  • At the Session level, you can configure which Peers are able to observe messages from other Peers in that Session. This determines which Peers form representations of others within the Session.

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Queue Status

To help developers understand when a Peer’s representation is fully up to date, Honcho exposes the ability to poll the status of Peer-centric queues that construct representations.
  • If no Session is specified, the queue status reflects pending work for the Peer’s global representation.
  • If a Session is specified, the queue status reflects pending work for the Peer’s working representation in that Session.
Honcho implements a powerful search endpoint that allows you to search for messages across a workspace, session, or peer with complex filters. The search process combines full-text and semantic search using reciprocal rank fusion. By default, all messages ingested into Honcho have embeddings generated and stored in the database, enabling semantic search — if this feature is disabled, the search process will only use full-text search. Results are returned in the form of a list of Message objects, and you may choose how many results to return. The default is 10 results, with a maximum of 100. In the SDK, search is available on Workspace, Session, and Peer objects, and an optional filters parameter may be used to apply a narrower search scope such as a time range or developer-defined metadata attached to messages. Note that results are not ordered by recency, only relevance. Results can be sorted by timestamp or a filter on the created_at field can limit results to recent messages. Look here for examples of how to use search in the SDK.

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Scoped API Keys

Builders can create scoped API keys to control access to different resources within Honcho.
  • Workspace-Level Keys: Access to everything scoped to a Workspace.
  • Peer-Level Keys: Access to everything scoped to a Peer.
  • Session-Level Keys: Access to everything scoped to a Session.

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Get Context

Honcho provides a powerful context retrieval feature that delivers formatted conversation context from sessions, making it easy to integrate with LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and others.
  • By default, the context includes a blend of summary and messages which covers the entire history of the session.
  • Summaries are generated automatically at intervals, and recent messages are included based on your specified token budget for the context.
  • You can set any token limit, and if you prefer, you can disable summaries so that the context consists entirely of the most recent messages up to your chosen limit.