mediumSierra Cognition Decagon

Should you build agent orchestration yourself or use a framework like LangGraph? How do you decide?

Frameworks promise speed and deliver abstraction you'll eventually fight. Rolling your own is more code but full control. Here is the honest tradeoff, and why many production teams end up thinner than they started.

Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Applied AI Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.

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These lessons teach the material this question tests, in order and from the beginning.

Applied AI Engineering·Tools and your first agentSign in12mTry these five things before you build an agentNow that you can build an agent, here is the ladder of cheaper designs to exhaust first. Each rung handles a large share of what people reach loops for, and moving up one rung at a time is how you end with a system you can operate.Agent Engineering·The ecosystem you will be asked aboutPremium14mWhat any agent framework has to solve, and how to judge oneNaming this year's frameworks is a lesson with a one-year shelf life. Naming the six problems every framework must solve is one you can use to evaluate the next one, and to answer the interview question without betting on a vendor.

UP NEXT ON YOUR JOURNEY

Next in this trackWorkflows versus agents: how much autonomy should you actually give an AI system, and how do you decide?Next in this trackBuild a customer-support agent over a fake product/SQL database: tool-calling, retrieval, and a control loop.Next in this trackBuild a small in-memory document indexer and retriever from scratch (inverted index + BM25), then add a vector option.

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