Why is every agent ever made just a worse Claude Code?

Reddit r/AI_Agents News

Summary

A developer questions the value of building specialized AI agents when general-purpose tools like Claude Code can accomplish the same tasks, suggesting that current agentic approaches are just less capable versions of Claude with extra guardrails.

I’ve been going a little crazy the last few weeks being tasked with building an open-ended agenetic solution and I could use a little reality check Define claude to be a capable harness, Claude code is probably the best right now but substitute what you feel is best. Basically, I can’t help but think that every agent that has ever been created is really just a less worse Claude with guardrails around data. As a trivial example: take an orchestrator agent, a database agent and a knowledge agent that has access to internal knowledge (pdfs, vector db etc). To implement this you have to define the abilities of each agent. The orchestrator agent needs to create structured plans, database agent needs to write and invoke sql queries, the knowledge agents interacts with a vector DB and travserses markdown files. This works well enough on its own, but Claude code can do all these with /goal. It might take it a few extra cycles to explore the db schema or find the markdown but it will get it done. What’s the point of even defining the capabilities of an agent by using tools=\[\]? I suppose it’s just a matter of limiting cycles of it having to iterate solutions that could be shortcutted by tools? That’s it? I’m getting pretty brain broken on this. In my mind, every problem no matter how abstracted and complex is composable into a DAG where each node is a task that Claude code can solve (assuming it's on a computer and barring some HITL limitations). Is the issue really just problem decomposition? Is this decomposition problem really that hard? I can feel myself getting poisoned by irony day by day being tasked with creating yet another agentic workflow using Claude code that is less functional than Claude code itself lol.
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