lingo — The Book

A literate-programming guide to lingo, a Python library for context engineering. Every code block in this book is executable. Run make book to compile and verify the full guide.

What lingo is

lingo is a library for building LLM-powered applications. Its core idea is that conversations are structured as typed messages inside a mutable Context, operations on that context are performed by an Engine that wraps an LLM, and the sequence of operations is described as a composable Flow.

LLM ──► Engine ──► Flow ──► Context
                              │
                              ▼
                         Lingo (orchestrator)

The top-level Lingo class is the chatbot facade: it owns a conversation history, builds flows from skills, and exposes a single .chat(msg) coroutine.

Chapters

1. Hello, lingo — LLM, Message, and your first chatbot
2. Messages and Context — Multimodal content, context manipulation
3. The Engine — reply, decide, choose, create, ask
4. Flows — Declarative, chainable workflows
5. Tools — Functions as LLM-callable tools
6. Skills and Routing — Multi-skill bots
7. State — Conversation state with atomic semantics
8. Patterns — End-to-end examples

Running the book

make book          # compile + test all chapters
make book-compile  # compile only (no tests)