These "frameworks" are useless, and as you say you can do what they offer in a few hours and better. So, stop using them. It's not a popularity contest.

Case in point: I don't use any frameworks whatsoever. I wrote a conversational AI Agent that helps me write AI Agents, integrated that into an office suite, unleashed that at the law office where I'm CTO, and we currently have just shy of 900 agents created by me, the attorneys and their staff. They support new client interviews, legal research, document authoring, case financial modeling, and pretty much whatever the staff needs to help them do what they already did before AI, just now they have idiot savant help.

Everything is based upon chat completion with most using structured output that is I/O with the office suite's internal data structures. The AI Agents act as virtual co-workers inside the office software used by staff, and they each personalize their agents to their needs.

If I tried to do this with these frameworks, I'd still be dinking around with their abstractions and lack of documentation.

They work, just barely, and definitely not up to the marketing hype. I'm in the space, and it's really hard to "sell" a solution to someone who had bought the marketing bs and says "X said they can do Y".

Most "agent frameworks" are just workflow builders with LLMs as a node in the workflow. Zapier can do most of what "agent frameworks" do with having OpenAI / Anthropic as a node. IMHO, to be an "agent", you need agency. And a lot of that agency has to do with having control over the control flow. (Design its own graph at runtime)

Agents with true agency - that is, generating the control flow at runtime is a hard problem (we've spent months into it - and it's still not generalizable). We've got a long way there with good old engineering (deterministic guardrails, progressively enriching context etc). (This is on top of the usual distributed systems problems - for example - solving for invoking tools idempotently / at least once delivery etc)

But the path of least resistance here is claim "How an AI agent 3x'd my inbound and mowed my lawn" and make a youtube video about how agents are going to take over the world.

Agents are all useless at the moment for me. I couldn't find a single good use to assist me in coding.

Maybe they eventually find a way, but right now it's worthless imho.

The updates to the foundational models is what makes a big difference.

I also find agents not worth the effort. But autogen has a method of creating agents automatically.