The Agent SDK

Every week we'd build a new thing in our agent workflow and then Google's ADK the following week would have support for something we could have used instead of rolling our own.

Reading this release makes me wonder what makes it special, nothing sticks out from the press release.

But I agree, the churn is real, people are starting to throw around the term software factory at the management level and I fear big efforts there will be outdated by the time they finish, even with coding agents support.

"Deploy" section of that article makes the difference.

2. Lots of people are used to Claude Code's interface/commands/etc. and don't feel like paying the cost of learning something new. The benefits would have to outweigh those switching costs, and it's unclear that they do.

3. Claude Code already works with your Claude MAX subscription[0], which gives you an incredible amount of usage of the top-tier models for cheap, which can't be matched by any open-source options. And most people won't exhaust this usage, so they have no real need to use open-source models.

4. Although it's hard to 100% confirm this, there's reason to believe that Claude itself works better with Claude Code than with other harnesses.

5. There's no real lock-in. If tomorrow you decide you don't want to use Claude Code, you can just switch to something else ezpz. So there's no reason to worry that you're digging a hole and locking yourself in. Thus, there's no urgency to switch away.

[0] Yes, open-source harnesses can use your Claude MAX subscription, but does this "benefit" of open-source harnesses really outweigh the costs of #1, #2, and #4 above?

Eg an agent that only runs off a webhook trigger doesn’t have a use for all the UI stuff Pi does (and you may not want the local state like Pi does by default).

I’m still sort of with you, I’d generally do ACP to an open source agent. You do get much finer grained control if you use one of these agent SDKs (there’s a bajillion of these as well).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but using Pi etc you're paying the full API price.

More and more harnesses are headed this way, there are two notable holdouts.

So a few people started using grok bot and I'll probably regret that some day, but honestly the deployment model they have here for custom agents is kind of appealing to me, much more than BigLang.

Cursor moving this direction, is a prep work where human no longer command that much , hence the usage will drop. e.g. their core product is vulnerable. Software factories, is the ultimate game over for our industry.

I think the difference is that those endless technologies will probably be used by other agents without people's explicit knowledge.

Why is a large number of ideas, technologies, frameworks, etc. bad?

The entrypoint still has to come from somewhere, and it's much more convenient to be able to explain the security and legal teams how data is handled, what is logged, how you can have control over a scenario where the agent does something unexpected.

Sure, for a personal project that could be enough, but we all know those companies target enterprise customers, and you would be surprised how little adoption there is when it comes to workflow automation due to the lack of controls.

This "runtime" is what you are building with LangChain.. A harness like claude code/codex etc is general purpose and its env is a shell + tools. But with a custom runtime (basically a loop where we ask llm what to do next), we can give it specific tools which we define in code. This can help with things like authorization since, well its custom code you own.. so the runtime gets the tools scoped to the users permissions etc.