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Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see the point of agent frameworks. Other than durability and checkpoints how does it help me?

Claude code already works as an agent that calls tools when necessary so it’s not clear how an abstraction helps here.

I have been really confused by langchain and related tech because they seem so bloated without offering me any advantages?

I genuinely would like to know what I’m missing.

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I ran into this question when thinking about the approach for a recent project. Yes CLI coding tools are good agents for interactive use, but if you are building a product then you do need an agent abstraction.

You could package Claude Code into the product (via agents-sdk or Claude -p) and have it use the API key (with metered billing) but in my case I didn’t find it ergonomic enough for my needs, so I ended up using my own agent framework Langroid for this.

https://github.com/langroid/langroid

(No it’s not based on that similarly named other framework, it’s a clean, minimal, extensible framework with good dx)

You don't need frameworks for one-off scripts, but in prod, you're going to need RAG, proper memory, tools, and orchestration anyway. Without standards you'll just end up writing your own janky framework on top of requests. LangChain is definitely a bloated mess, but it provides structure. The beauty of Elixir is that this structure (OTP) is baked into the language, not duct-taped on the side

There's lots of things you could do. Imagine you're making a group chat bot (way more difficult than a 1-1 chat) where people can play social games by giving the LLM game rules. You can have an agent that only manages game state using natural language (controlled by the main LLM). You could have an agent dedicated to remembering important conversation, while not paying attention to chit-chatting

What more functionality do you need than the system prompt and list of tools?

Even if you’re just running Claude Code as an external CLI then Elixir makes this easier because it supervises and handles external processes gracefully. Starting, checking, stopping processes needs to be done manually in most languages.

100% agreed

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