Start at Level 1, Finish at Our Pricing Page

Ashpreet Bedi, writing about "The 5 Levels of Agentic Software":

Most teams overcomplicate agents. They start with multi-agent orchestration, autonomous reasoning loops, and over-the-top infrastructure. Then spend weeks debugging why the simplest tasks fail.

He's right. And the framework — start with a single agent and tools, add storage, then memory, then multi-agent coordination, then production infrastructure — is sensible advice. "Start at Level 1" is the correct instinct, and the honest admission that multi-agent teams are "powerful but unpredictable" is the kind of thing you almost never hear from someone selling you the orchestration layer.

The problem is that someone is selling you the orchestration layer. Every code snippet runs on Agno, Bedi's own framework. The five "levels" map perfectly onto Agno's feature set because they were derived from it, not from the problem space. A framework-agnostic version of this taxonomy would have messier boundaries and harder trade-offs at every step. It would also be less useful as a product tour.

Two things bother me.

First, Levels 2 and 3 — knowledge and memory — are presented as configuration problems. Add a vector database, seed it with your coding standards, flip on enable_agentic_memory. In practice, these are the levels where every team I've spoken to actually gets stuck. Not on the wiring, but on the curation: keeping knowledge current, handling contradictions between retrieved context and model training, deciding what the agent should trust and when. The hard part isn't knowledge.insert(). The hard part is everything that happens six weeks after you call it.

Second, Level 5 is "swap SQLite for Postgres and wrap it in FastAPI." That's not an architectural level. That's a deployment checklist. The actual hard problems of production agentic systems — evaluation, regression testing, cost control, graceful failure, knowing when to stop and ask a human — don't appear anywhere in the piece. Calling a database migration a "level" while ignoring all of that is a tell.

The best advice in the post is "start simple, add capabilities progressively, verify behaviour at each step." I'd just add: verify behaviour with something other than the framework author's blog post.