It might also suggest they went with the first LLM recommendation, like Anthropic choosing React for Claude Code.

Which specific strategies do you think are outdated, and what would you recommend instead? This sounds more like a criticism of older versions of LangChain than its current APIs. The post also uses deepagents, a separate package in the same ecosystem. Is there something in the current implementation of either that you’re referring to?

Instead of spending half the comment reflecting on your post why not point out what you don’t like about it or some better alternatives?

+1 would love to know as well. I have generally found the open source space to be lacking in this area and hoping it catches up!

There's like 1000 langchain alternatives and none are good, they're all vibe-coded unstable projects.

I use Apache Burr but it's not as good as LangChain. I just don't want to use software whose website has a pricing page if it's not a SAAS.

It's a lot of sugar and high level abstractions on top of existing things, I find using the existing things not that complicated or difficult and I struggle to see the value on using the framework as it doesn't sit well with my way of abstracting the stack.

Mostly custom. Full data model and full web and mobile app to help run day to day operations.

The agent has switched a few times, initially NanoClaw, then Hermes, and now Vercel's Eve (maximum customizability).

NextJS/Shadcn web app, postgres db, eve agent layer, MCP tools (over 100 so every single thing can be done by an agent), SwiftUI mobile app, etc.

Integrations with gmail, gcal, gdrive, quickbooks, using mdx for the wiki displays (so we have rich diagrams, 3d models, etc).

We write about it here: https://kznconsulting.com/work/how-we-run-kaizen

But no darkmode support? … :D

None of these have been especially impressive.

I think that’s because none of them go past “I’ve set up agents to be orchestrated this way” and that’s about as impressive as “look at my cloudformation template”.

This site could use a bit more line height, more paragraphs, or less text overall.

[Bad mental image ... can't unsee ...] :)

Oldies let's gather here.

There's quite a bit of cool stuff in the console too! The one in the top right corner

Size and scale, I would think. An out of the box solution probably doesn't quite have the same capabilities as something they can (and now have to) manage in it's entirety.

Stripe probably WANTS to be opinionated about how their company works with the tools.

In the first paragraph:

No existing tool could handle the data security requirements and specific workflows Stripe needed

Almost as if distributed safe compute for autonomous workloads suddenly came into focus for many orgs!

Dammit, I just named my newborn son Kai.

Your project seems way better than the stuff they built, nice work.

I like it, very smart for agents at scale.

Thank you. Yes, I did. There might be some AI-isms in there, because agents just can’t help themselves to dump their arcanae in there.

Wow, where do you work? Can we talk? Looking for smart people!

It’s a cool name! Don’t let Stripe make you doubt that haha

Don't worry, thanks to nominative determinism, you've secured your kids employment years in advance

The article reads like slop, to be honest.

It's very close to the direction we're taking for windmill.dev, we call it "operator builders" rather than focus on "knowledge graph" which the article is very light on details of.

What I'm mostly reading is a developer platform and runtime where users can build agents that can run tools and for that you need a secure code runtime, ACL/permissions, easy way to build apps or what cloudflare OS call gadgets. We're betting on this too at https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill, very curious to see if that's the future for most enterprise and if a model where everyone vibe-code/fork cloudflare OS to their enterprise need is the future, or a more exhaustive/enterprise platform like ours does.

haha stripe's example prompt is "Create an event"

Its always more likely the company pushing the PR is less polished than they present themselves.

It's possibly a cost benefit thing. Moving quickly with AI leaves blood splatter, but if you get enough in return you decide it's worth it anyway.

I worked there. All the internal tools are amazingly polished. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Ultimately, it is pragmatic for businesses to behave this way, but it is a shame for those who love the craft. I think we took for granted the beautiful ornate hand carved furniture era of software engineering. We are now in the ikea era.

I feel this so much. I thought AI would make it easier to get lots of hand-carved ornate furniture; but right now what we are getting looks like the typical Ikea product line -- a bunch of mismatched pieces by a host of different designers with no common underlying design theme or continuity (I'm talking specifically about the looks and design, not the materials).

Maybe they have jobs to do so they offloaded a lot of the presentation work to AI, assuming reasonable people would not judge based on surface level copy style.

I recently had to implement a stripe payment system for a client (having never used it before) and found their documentation to be accurate and excellent (at least for the Java SDK and relatively basic use case).

No love for Stripe but IMO their documentation feels like a first-class product.

Somewhat interesting how the design of Stripe's developer-focused landing pages used to be the "cream of the crop," so to speak, but now they just look like Claude run amok. I wonder if the web design "skills" for Claude, and other LLMs, were overly trained on Stripe.

By choice. I currently work at Stripe (opinions my own, I'm just some guy) and was here when it released. It's a genuinely useful tool, which explains the widespread adoption.

Hope this comes over as constructive criticism:

  1. The whole interface feels way too vibe coded with tons of unneeded stuff. Why does it have a console and snake game built in? Why does it have annoying sounds? Why is it full of AI slop writing? The latter is especially confusing because the first person listed under authors is a "Technical Writer". I guess the interface is the general stripe.dev page not exactly related to Kai but the post definitely is pure AI slop writing.
  2. It seems to claim things that might not be substantiated like the following: "When Account Executives use Kai, they produce 2x the sales activity, create 17% more opportunities, generate 26% more revenue opportunities, and close 39% more deals when compared to the same sellers in weeks they don't use it." Correlation is not causation. If sales people have less activity (vacations or sick days etc) then they also wont use this tool much, it doesn't mean all the increase in sales is because of the tool.
  3. the post talks a lot about how great this tool is but it describes nearly nothing of value to the outsider who can't access it. What were the valuable lessons learned? What's neat about it? There is not much meat imho.

It doesn't live up to my usual expectations from Stripe.

Does your browser have a reader mode? Looks quite decent in Safari and Brave

Building a standalone agent product wouldn't work. Instead, it would force users out of their natural workflows and into a new app.

I am finding the opposite to be true with one of my clients. They explicitly want a new channel. The chat-style UI/UX is vastly preferred over their poorly maintained internal tooling.

I suppose if you are Stripe actual, most things would be well designed and more difficult to abandon. Most places aren't like Stripe.

The hard part is bringing everything that matters to the new channel, but it's certainly feasible to do this. I am doing it right now. We will soon be able to delete hundreds of wildly inconsistent cshtml views and related controllers in favor of a single agent tool that applies json patches. This will easily cover 99.9% of use cases. A manual json editor is retained for the rare case where we need some multi-megabyte merge operation.