The “build it by hand first” part is spot on. I’ve found the same thing with agents — frameworks make sense much faster once you’ve fought with the loop yourself.
Thanks, Julian. That's exactly the bet. Once you've written the loop yourself, a framework stops being magic and becomes a set of choices you can judge.
That's why LangGraph only shows up in week 3, after the hand-built version has already hit the problems it solves.
Curious which part of the loop fought you hardest?