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by marcklingen 555 days ago
-- langfuse founder/maintainer here

After working with thousands of teams building agents and complex LLM applications, I'd conclude that:

- all frameworks have their strengths and weaknesses, Crew and LangGraph are the popular options if you want to use a framework, both have sdk methods or add-on packages to visualize the agent

- biggest overall strength is to get started quickly

- biggest overall weakness is that complexity is abstracted which can lead to building more complexity than necessary, making it harder to maintain

- many teams build light abstractions and do very well with them

- larger organizations benefit from frameworks as it standardizes how llm applications are built, thus being able to hire and move people between teams while relying on the same abstraction -- without needing to design a generalized abstraction that works for all sorts of use cases

- many use cases do not need an "agent", implementation can be simpler and more predictable

I think you'd enjoy this very recent podcast episode on one way of thinking about building agents with SOTA models: https://www.latent.space/p/claude-sonnet

tldl: many use cases need less abstraction than initially assumed when using SOTA models, focus on tools as they have a lot of leverage on performance/quality

PS: Would love to chat in case you are interested as we currently plan many improvements with regards to agents. I just saw your message on this in the acquired slack and responded there right before getting the HN notification.