1. The CLI is excellent. adk web, adk run, and api_server make it super smooth to start building and debugging. It feels like a proper developer-first tool. Love this part.

2. The docs have some unnecessary setup steps—like creating folders manually - that add friction for no real benefit.

3. Support for multiple model providers is impressive. Not just Gemini, but also GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, LLaMA, etc, thanks to LiteLLM. Big win for flexibility.

4. Async agents and conversation management introduce unnecessary complexity. It’s powerful, but the developer experience really suffers here.

5. Artifact management is a great addition. Being able to store/load files or binary data tied to a session is genuinely useful for building stateful agents.

6. The different types of agents feel a bit overengineered. LlmAgent works but could’ve stuck to a cleaner interface. Sequential, Parallel, and Loop agents are interesting, but having three separate interfaces instead of a unified workflow concept adds cognitive load. Custom agents are nice in theory, but I’d rather just plug in a Python function.

7. AgentTool is a standout. Letting one agent use another as a tool is a smart, modular design.

8. Eval support is there, but again, the DX doesn’t feel intuitive or smooth.

9. Guardrail callbacks are a great idea, but their implementation is more complex than it needs to be. This could be simplified without losing flexibility.

10. Session state management is one of the weakest points right now. It’s just not easy to work with.

11. Deployment options are solid. Being able to deploy via Agent Engine (GCP handles everything) or use Cloud Run (for control over infra) gives developers the right level of control.

12. Callbacks, in general, feel like a strong foundation for building event-driven agent applications. There’s a lot of potential here.

13. Minor nitpick: the artifacts documentation currently points to a 404.

Final thoughts

Frameworks like ADK are most valuable when they empower beginners and intermediate developers to build confidently. But right now, the developer experience feels like it's optimized for advanced users only. The ideas are strong, but the complexity and boilerplate may turn away the very people who’d benefit most. A bit of DX polish could make ADK the go-to framework for building agentic apps at scale.