Custom Agents are Antipatterns

In the last few years I've seen people struggling to offer some value through the use of AI Agents. Across examples I noticed a common shape in them, and I now know how to articulate my problem with it. By far the worst way to use Agents is to come up with your own custom text box in your website that runs an internal LLM using tools that are opaque to you. You are telling me that I have to give up the convenience of my own setup in ChatGPT/Claude and use your custom harness? The best example of this is Atlassian Rovo. They made this really fancy thing that hooks into their UI. Why?!Another classic example is GitLab's Duo Agent. For those who don't know, it is an Agent that perhaps can do fancy things but it is meant to be accessed in the Gitlab webapp. Why? What's the value in this? Dude... just make the damn MCP and let me use it in my own setup. It's not just these two companies. Almost every company you've thought of has examples like this. Why I think this happensFundamentally,…