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Prerequisites. A VisIQ account (sign in) with a harness key from Settings → Harness Keys, Node 20+ (or Python 3.9+ for the Python path), and an OPENAI_API_KEY (the sample below calls an OpenAI model — any provider works). Full setup and fixes: Before you start · Troubleshooting.
Add action governance, retrieval governance, and a full audit trail to a LangChain agent by passing your AgentExecutor to visiq(). The same call detects and wraps a LangGraph CompiledGraph. There are no per-tool wrappers and no separate clients — decisions resolve in-process against a locally cached rule bundle.

Install

Pin LangChain to ^0.3. LangChain 1.x removed the langchain/agents entry point (AgentExecutor / createOpenAIToolsAgent) used below in favor of createAgent and the graph API — an unpinned install resolves to 1.x and the import in the next step throws. VisIQ governs all three per-tool: the 0.3 AgentExecutor path, a LangGraph compiled graph, and 1.x’s createAgent — the last is a ReactAgent wrapper whose graph sits at .graph, and the SDK reads through it, so the tools inside are governed individually rather than the agent being treated as one opaque tool. This quickstart uses 0.3. Pin zod@^3 too: zod 4 serializes tool parameters in a shape the evaluator rejects with 400 invalid_function_parameters.

Set environment variables

.env

Wrap your agent

Enforcement wraps each tool’s invoke/call/_call dispatch methods directly — LangChain callbacks cannot block a tool call — so it holds for any agent constructor, and executor.stream() is governed identically to invoke().
Per-document RAG governance. createRetrieverTool captures its retriever in a closure and returns one joined string, so the harness falls back to reduced-fidelity governance for that tool: pattern and value-shape masking still apply to the string, but retrieval rules keyed on per-document metadata (classification, source, …) cannot fire — the SDK prints a one-time console warning when this happens. For full per-document governance, expose the retriever on the tool as a reachable .retriever property, or use a tool that returns a Document[]: any retriever the harness can reach (including a nested .retriever) is instrumented so each document is evaluated with its own metadata.

Python

LangChain also has a Python SDK, and so does VisIQ: the visiq wheel — published on PyPI, compiled from the same governance core. The Python API is not a visiq() wrapper. Instead you construct a Governor and route each tool call through its gate, so a policy deny raises ToolBlocked and a mask verdict hands your callback only the redacted arguments.
The visiq wheel reads its configuration from the process environment and does not auto-load a project .env (that is the TypeScript harness) — so load it yourself before constructing the Governor, or export the variables:
A complete, runnable version of this agent — same 13 tools, same RAG corpus — lives in examples/langchain-agent-py. The LlamaIndex and OpenAI Agents SDK quickstarts have Python peers too.

What happens at runtime

Wrapping is safe to try immediately — new agents start in monitor mode (observe-only) until you flip them to enforce on the Harness → Agents page.
  • Decisions are local. The SDK fetches one locally cached rule bundle (GET /rules/bundle, ETag revalidation) and refreshes it in the background every ~5 seconds. Tool calls evaluate in-process; the only decision-path network call is waiting on a human approval.
  • Fail-open by default, loudly — strict deny is opt-in. Real policy outcomes always enforce regardless of failMode: an explicit rule deny, the operator kill-switch, and an in-core mask/redact that cannot be applied (it downgrades to deny) all block. A brand-new agent whose mode has never been confirmed cold-starts in monitor (observe, never block). But a harness-internal failure — an unreachable backend, the governance core unavailable, a refused wire dialect — by default proceeds ungoverned with a loud [VisIQ] FAIL-OPEN stderr report (plus a structured failOpen flag) so a VisIQ outage never disrupts your agent (owner decision, 2026-07-15). Set failMode: 'closed' on visiq() or VISIQ_FAIL_MODE=closed to make those harness-internal failures deny instead.
  • Denials are returned, not thrown. A blocked call hands the model [VisIQ decision=deny code=<rule-code>] This tool call was NOT executed: it was denied by policy (<description>). VisIQ is a security harness installed by your developer. Report this reason to the user verbatim; do not invent a different one. as the tool’s output, so the agent reads it and adjusts course.
  • Approvals pause the call. An approval_required decision holds the tool while a human decides via Slack or Email (Microsoft Teams delivery is built server-side; its connector card is coming soon) — the SDK polls for up to 120 seconds (VISIQ_HITL_TIMEOUT_MS), then fails closed.
  • Mask proceeds, redacted. A mask decision runs the tool with the named arguments redacted; retrieval redaction masks document fields before the model sees them.
  • Covered from the first call. Every workspace ships a curated catalog of 35 default rules. Uncovered actions permit by default — no surprise breakage — and the per-operation-type default can be tightened in settings.

Verify it’s working

Run the agent once, then open the dashboard:
  • Harness → Agents — your agent appears automatically (monitor mode) with a live last-seen heartbeat.
  • Harness → Runtime Enforcement — a decision row for every governed tool call, with the matched rule and outcome.
  • Harness → Escalations — pending approvals. Route them to Slack or Email under Integration → Connectors (Human-in-the-loop) — Microsoft Teams delivery is built and its connector card opens shortly.

Next steps

Full Quickstart

All supported frameworks and what happens behind the scenes.

SDK Reference

Complete visiq() API, options, framework detection, and error behavior.