In early October 2026 I reflected on the evolution of AI tooling, noting a clear move away from high‑level orchestration frameworks toward custom, hand‑rolled loops for coding harnesses and agents.
Looking back, it is so interesting that we all rushed in 2023-24 to learn LangChain and many other frameworks.
And now, almost all major coding harnesses and agents are just hand‑rolled loops.
Turns out, the abstraction was the overhead.
Open questions remain about measurable performance gains, emerging best‑practice patterns for hand‑rolled loops, and how this shift impacts maintainability and onboarding.