Comment by lunarcave

They work, just barely, and definitely not up to the marketing hype. I'm in the space, and it's really hard to "sell" a solution to someone who had bought the marketing bs and says "X said they can do Y".

Most "agent frameworks" are just workflow builders with LLMs as a node in the workflow. Zapier can do most of what "agent frameworks" do with having OpenAI / Anthropic as a node. IMHO, to be an "agent", you need agency. And a lot of that agency has to do with having control over the control flow. (Design its own graph at runtime)

Agents with true agency - that is, generating the control flow at runtime is a hard problem (we've spent months into it - and it's still not generalizable). We've got a long way there with good old engineering (deterministic guardrails, progressively enriching context etc). (This is on top of the usual distributed systems problems - for example - solving for invoking tools idempotently / at least once delivery etc)

But the path of least resistance here is claim "How an AI agent 3x'd my inbound and mowed my lawn" and make a youtube video about how agents are going to take over the world.