ADK-Rust v0.5.0 — The Journey to a Major Release

v0.5.0 is the biggest ADK-Rust release yet. It touches every layer of the framework — from new crates and model providers to a completely refreshed developer experience. Here's the story.

New Crates

v0.5.0 introduces several new crates that expand what agents can do:

• adk-rag — Retrieval-Augmented Generation with pluggable chunkers, embedding providers (Gemini, OpenAI), and vector stores (in-memory, Qdrant, pgvector, LanceDB)
• adk-code — Sandboxed code execution for agents that need to run code
• adk-deploy — Shared manifest and bundling contract for the upcoming ADK Platform
• adk-rust-macros — Derive macros for cleaner tool and agent definitions

Model Provider Updates

Two new dedicated provider docs landed: Anthropic (with extended thinking support) and OpenAI Responses API (the successor to Chat Completions). The provider trait now supports context caching lifecycle management — set a CacheCapable model and the runner handles cache creation, refresh, and TTL automatically.

Breaking Changes

The upgrade from 0.3.1 required adapting to a few API changes:

• RunnerConfig gained four new fields for context caching, cancellation tokens, and request context
• Runner::run() now takes UserId and SessionId newtypes instead of raw strings
• AdkError::Tool became AdkError::tool() (lowercase constructor)

cargo-adk CLI

The new cargo-adk CLI replaces manual project setup. Five templates cover the most common starting points: basic Gemini agent, custom tools, RAG with vector search, REST server, and OpenAI-powered agent.

cargo install cargo-adk
cargo adk new my-agent --template rag
cd my-agent && cargo run

Website Refresh

The website got a visual overhaul: deeper navy palette, refined code blocks with glow effects, a v0.5.0 release badge in the hero, and the Get Started section now uses the cargo-adk CLI flow. All 47 docs were synced fresh from the upstream repo, and 5 new doc pages were added (RAG, Code Execution, Payments, Anthropic, OpenAI Responses).

What's Next

The roadmap for the rest of 2026 includes ADK Platform (managed deployment), Super Agents (Job Hunter, Customer Voices), and deeper integrations with the VS Code extension. The framework continues to push toward making Rust the best language for building production AI agents.