[cpfiffer]

This is my sense too.

I haven't really found any agent framework that gives me anything I need above a simple structured gen call.

As you say, most requests to LLMs are (should be?) prompt-in structure-out, in line with the Unix philosophy of doing precisely one thing well.

Agent frameworks are simply too early. They are layers built to abstract a set of design patterns that are not common. We should only build abstractions when it is obvious that everyone is reinventing the wheel.

In the case of agents, there is no wheel to invent. It's all simple language model calls.

I commonly use the phrase "the language model should be the most boring part of your code". You should be spending most of your time building the actual software and tooling -- LLMs are a small component of your software. Agent frameworks often make the language model too large a character in your codebase, at least for my tastes.