Agentic AI Is Not There Yet: Lessons from Multi-Agent Deployments

No agentic system is as good as ChatGPT’s GPT 3.5 release in Nov 2022 (and its hockey-stick moment).

✔️ You can extend ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude with projects, assistants, and reminders, but only so much

✔️ Lovable, Replit, Bolt, v0 are mostly UI-based, with automations and self-hosted integrations not a core priority

✔️ LangChain and CrewAI shape some design patterns and provide high-level abstract modeling, but provisioning is rough (also, see the next step)

✔️ MCPs are hitting timeouts and limits far more than anticipated, plus unpredictability in non-deterministic data

✔️ OpenClaw is a great toy that “can” be helpful if you hook it on your personal machine to all your accounts, but 99% chance you’ll regret dearly for both security and opinionated reasons

✔️ Setting it properly takes a good chunk of time, it doesn’t play well with MCPs, new skills are installed one at a time, basic email/Workspace management is far more complex with pub/sub and gog provisioning, especially for multi-agent environments

✔️ Some spinoffs like nanobot and nanoclaw and such are not popping up, but the versatility of ChatGPT or Lovable or other “instantly click” moments ranking millions of users in a matter of days while solving a real problem are just not there

✔️ Deterministic workflows such as the standards of Zapier, n8n, Make are still predominantly workflow-based, with lots of clicking and drag-and-drop, which isn’t as efficient as the scaffolding we deal with since 2024 (and even the 2010s with some programming frameworks building ORMs and data layers and views in no time)

Between security, ranking high costs with Opus 4.6, managing models, cloud permissions, API keys, OAuth renewable tokens across a myriad of systems, agentic autonomy will take its time. Plenty of other pieces should come together and catch up simultaneously.

Right now, different businesses – cloud providers like Railway or Digital Ocean, API orchestrators like OpenRouter, private network gateways like Tailscale and many more are working to bring this in together, but getting all business tools and suites adopt this properly is at least a year forward in time.