[jameslk]

We're in the early days of agentic frameworks, like the pre-PHP web. CGI scripts and webmasters. Eventually the state-of-the-art will slow down and we'll eventually have something elegant like Rails come out.

Until then, every agent framework is completely reinvented every week due to new patterns and new models. evals, ReACT, DSPy, RLM, memory patterns, claws, dynamic context, sandbox strategies. It seems like locking in to a framework is a losing proposition for anyone trying to stay competitive. See also: LangChain trying to be the Next.js/Vercel of agents but everyone recommending building your own.

That said, Anthropic pulls a lot of weight owning the models themselves and probably an easier-to-use solution will get some adoption from those who are better served by going from nothing to something agentic, despite lock-in and the constant churn of model tech

[dmix]

Completely agree re: AI chatbot/RAG being just like the pre-PHP web world. There's a hundred half baked solutions floating on blogs and github but not a coherent dominant framework that puts it all together properly. Langchain is close but still feels a bit abstract and DIY.

That plus everyone is using 5 different vector DBs and reranking models from different vendors than the answer models etc.

[gck1]

I believe framework is simply never, ever going to work for LLM-based agentic workflows.

Framework is simply way too rigid for a non-deterministic technology.

We may see libraries that provide tools for managing agents, but then again, there's nothing that tmux can't do already.

[harlequinetcie]

I'm a bit at odds with this.

I agree a framework is something that sounds outdated.

I also believe an orchestrator is needed. Something that abstracts you from a specific provider. Like hardware, drivers and operating systems.

Right now, my thoughts are on that line: Who will build that operating system? Who will have it in the cloud?

It needs to be robust to operate for large organizations, open source, and sit on top of any provider.

Right now we are seeing BSD vs GNU/Linux vs DOS kind of battles.

[dbmikus]

necro-posting here, but that's kinda what we're working on! We're focused on creating cloud workspaces for sandboxed coding agents and it's built to support any agent harness. https://www.amika.dev/

Under the hood, we're open sourcing a lot of the parts for provisioning these agents, their VMs/sandboxes, and managing agent messaging + sessions. Put our open source plans here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vevSJsSCWT_reuD7JwAuGCX5...

[suncemoje]

I've been using the OpenAI Agents SDK for a while now and am largely happy with the abstractions - handoffs/sub-agents, tools, guardrails, structured output, etc. Building the infra and observability, and having it scale reliably, was a bigger pain for me. So I do get Anthropic's move into managed agents.