Title: Discussion 8 — Pick Your Trade-Off
Course: AIINFRA 300: Agentic AI & the Model Context Protocol (MCP) > Section: Week 08 — Code-First Agent Frameworks II: CrewAI and OpenAI Agents SDK

💬 Discussion 8 — Pick Your Trade-Off (20 pts)

Prompt: CrewAI makes it hard to express real conditional branching — routing logic tends to get pushed into brittle agent prompts, and its delegation is harder to trace than explicit handoffs. The OpenAI Agents SDK gives you explicit, observable handoffs, but it has no built-in state persistence or crash recovery — a mid-run crash means starting over unless you've built your own durability layer. Given a customer-facing production agent (something real users depend on staying reliable), which trade-off would you accept, and why? Would you pick CrewAI's cleaner multi-provider flexibility and looser orchestration despite the branching/debugging cost, or the OpenAI Agents SDK's explicit control despite having to build your own persistence? Is there a scenario where you'd mitigate the weak side of your choice (e.g., adding your own checkpointing to the OpenAI SDK, or pushing CrewAI toward Flows for the parts that need real branching)? Post your initial response (150+ words) by midweek, citing at least one specific point from the lecture or lab. Then respond to two peers — ideally at least one who chose differently than you — pushing back on or building on their reasoning with a concrete example.