Every team I've worked with this year started the same way: someone watched a Cursor demo on a Tuesday, and by Friday they were three weeks into building their own agent framework. By month two, they had a half-finished tool router, a custom retry loop, a memory abstraction nobody understood, and a production incident. I'm an AWS Developer Advocate, and over the last year I've sat with 12 teams shipping agentic systems on Bedrock — from a fintech doing fraud triage to a healthcare team summarizing clinical notes. The teams that shipped on time had one thing in common: they stopped building framework-shaped things and started writing boring, debuggable Python around the Strands SDK. This talk is the contrarian version of "how to build agents." I'll walk through the seven framework anti-patterns I keep seeing (the Tool Registry, the Custom Memory Layer, the Orchestration DSL, and four more), show the production incidents each one caused, and then live-code a multi-tool agent using Strands in under 10 minutes — the same agent two of those 12 teams ended up with after they deleted their framework. You'll leave with: a checklist for spotting "framework drift" in your own codebase, a working Strands agent on GitHub you can fork tonight, and an opinionated answer to "should we build this in LangGraph or Strands or just plain Python?" No slides about the future of AI. No "agentic transformation." Just code, war stories, and the diff between what teams thought they needed and what actually shipped.
Vishal Alhat is a Developer Advocate at AWS, a former AWS Hero, and a HashiCorp Ambassador based in Bengaluru. Over 11 years he's worn most of the hats engineers care about — backend, platform, SRE, security — and now spends his days helping developers ship agentic AI on Bedrock without setting their on-call rotation on fire. He's mentored 5,000+ developers, picked up a Community Builder of the Year award along the way, and has a soft spot for the boring middle of the stack: observability, evals, IaC, and the unglamorous work that keeps production quiet at 3 AM. He writes technical blogs and posts mostly-useful things on social platforms. Recent Talks: AWS re:Invent, AWS Summit India, KCD Sri Lanka, AWS UG Hong Kong meetup.
