ADK Advanced Features

Guide for advanced ADK features including visual building and extended thinking. Covers no-code development and enhanced reasoning capabilities.

When to Use

• Building agents with drag-and-drop visual tools
• Enabling chain-of-thought reasoning
• Complex multi-step problem solving
• Prototyping without writing code
• Tasks requiring explicit reasoning steps

When NOT to Use

• Standard agent creation → Use @adk-core instead
• Tool integration → Use @adk-tools instead
• Multi-agent systems → Use @adk-orchestration instead

Key Concepts

Visual Builder provides drag-and-drop agent design via adk web --builder. Create agents visually and export to Python code.

ThinkingConfig enables extended reasoning with configurable token budgets. The model explicitly works through problems before answering.

Thinking Budget controls how many tokens the model uses for reasoning. Higher budgets enable deeper analysis but increase latency and cost.

Chain-of-Thought prompting combined with ThinkingConfig improves performance on complex reasoning tasks.

Visual-to-Code Export generates Python from visual designs, enabling no-code prototyping with full code control later.

References

Detailed guides with code examples:

• references/visual-builder.md - Visual development tools
• references/thinking.md - Extended thinking configuration