As someone who builds production agent systems daily, the "plumbing problem" is so real. I've spent countless hours wiring up tool routing, error handling, retry logic, and state management between agent steps. Claude's managed agents approach abstracts away the orchestration layer so you can focus on what the agent actually does rather than how it communicates between steps. The key insight is that agent reliability in production comes from the framework handling edge cases (timeouts, partial failures, context overflow) not from the developer manually coding every failure path. This is similar to how n8n simplified workflow automation — the value isn't in the individual nodes, it's in the reliable execution engine connecting them.