Ask HN: Why Is Every Company Building Own Agent Framework? Isn't One Enough?
7 notaiagent 12 4/11/2025, 9:28:23 AM
It feels like every major AI company — OpenAI, Anthropic (Claude), Google, etc. — is now rolling out its own agentic framework, orchestration library, or tool for managing LLM “agents.” We’ve seen LangChain and similar projects actively evolving in this space, but now each big player is launching something new almost monthly.
As a developer and researcher, I’m wondering: • Why are we reinventing the wheel so often instead of improving a common SDK or open framework? • Is there a fundamental technical reason (e.g., architectural, security, integration) why companies don’t just contribute to or extend existing libraries? • Or is it more about platform lock-in, developer ecosystems, or strategic positioning?
Would love to hear perspectives from people working in or close to these projects.
Matirity, convergence and eventual standardization will organically arise down the line as the space settles down, but that time is not now.
Why react, angular, whatever else is front end?
Why different clouds and similar services?
Leader, front runner, early adopter and not invented here mindset allows competition and community to rally around what will become the next big thing
What I find puzzling in the current wave of AI agent libraries is that many seem to be doing almost exactly the same thing — wrapping LLMs, defining tools, planning steps — just with slightly different APIs or names. It’s hard to see a fundamental divergence in capability or vision, at least so far.
So my question is less about why variety exists — and more about whether this current fragmentation is actually productive, or just noise driven by branding and platform lock-in strategies.
Would love to be wrong here if others are seeing more substantial innovation beneath the surface.
I do believe there's room for segmentation on agents as well. Manus and ChatGPT Deep Research are fairly different and they likely access different sources. Grok seems to play mostly on social media and so on. I think companies need the kind of depth that Cursor has. GitHub tried to do a bit of everything and failed despite their resources.
It's just in my blood. I want to build things that others use, and build it really well with a perfect documentation and some hand-on videos.
Welcome to the world of software technology, can I interest you in one of the 87 JavaScript frameworks out there that all manipulate an HTML DOM in one way or another?
Setting the sarcasm aside, I think there are "AI" companies popping up which do these types of things - orchestration, agent libraries, etc. so it makes some sense for each AI company to have their own flavor of those available.
Edit to add: I put "AI" company in quotes because at a technical level these companies/apps aren't creating AI themselves, they are wrapping AI HTTP APIs.