LLM Primitives

Sema's differentiating feature: LLM operations are first-class language primitives with prompts, conversations, tools, and agents as native data types.

Setup

Set one or more API keys as environment variables:

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...
export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...
# or any other supported provider

Sema auto-detects and configures all available providers on startup. Use --no-llm to skip auto-configuration.

See Provider Management for the full list of supported providers and configuration options.

Features

Completion & Chat

Simple completions, multi-message chat, and streaming responses.

Prompts & Messages

Prompts as composable s-expressions, message construction, and prompt inspection.

Conversations

Persistent, immutable conversation state with automatic LLM round-trips.

Tools & Agents

Define tools the LLM can invoke, and build agents with system prompts, tools, and multi-turn loops.

Embeddings & Similarity

Generate embeddings and compute cosine similarity.

Structured Extraction

Extract structured data from text and classify inputs.

Provider Management

Auto-configuration, runtime provider switching, and supported provider table.

Cost Tracking & Budgets

Usage tracking, budget enforcement, and batch/parallel operations.