Agentic engineers can build well defined, very deterministic middleware on top of OpenRouter.

Anthropic even says, that an agent based solution should only be your last resort and that most problems are well served with a one-shot.

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-age...

Written 1.5 years ago. Anthropic would not advertise this stance today.

I'm much more agreeable with that type of LLM workflow. Running "agents" with monolithic "harness" for long time horizon tasks seems wasteful, unecessary but probably super appealing to lazy people.