Google ADK
Google's open-source multi-agent framework built for production from day one
The Panel's Take
Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) is an open-source Python framework for building, evaluating, and deploying multi-agent systems at production scale. It handles orchestration with built-in tool calling, memory management, structured output, streaming, and first-class connectors for Vertex AI, Gemini, and any OpenAI-compatible API. ADK's philosophy is agent-as-code rather than visual builders. Agents are Python classes with typed inputs/outputs, making them testable, versionable, and CI/CD-compatible from day one. The framework includes an evaluation harness, artifact management, session persistence, and failure recovery — all the production plumbing that most agent frameworks leave to the developer. The multi-agent layer handles spawning, communication, and coordination between agents as a platform primitive rather than custom glue code. With 8,200+ GitHub stars since its April release, ADK is already one of the most-watched agent frameworks. The combination of Google's infrastructure backing, Apache 2.0 licensing, and pragmatic production focus sets it apart from research-oriented frameworks. It's the entry point to Google's broader agentic infrastructure stack, including the newly announced 8th-gen TPUs.
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Google ADK verdict: SHIP 🚀 3 ships · 1 skip from the expert panel Full review: shiporskip.io/tool/google-adk-python-agent-development-kit-multiagent-vertex-gemini-open-source-2026
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“The evaluation harness and session persistence are what make this real. Most frameworks give you the happy path and leave you to build all the production scaffolding yourself. ADK ships with the hard parts included, which is why it hit 8K stars so fast.”
“Google has a graveyard of developer platforms it's abandoned — Stadia, Firebase, Cloud Functions v1. Betting your production agent infrastructure on Google's continued commitment to an open-source framework is a real risk, especially when LangChain and CrewAI have two years of community momentum.”
“Google is making a stack bet: ADK → Vertex AI → 8th-gen TPUs. If that stack wins, ADK becomes the Rails of agentic AI — the default framework for the majority of production deployments. The infrastructure integration is the moat that makes this more than just another orchestration layer.”
“Typed inputs and outputs for agents finally makes multi-agent pipelines debuggable. I can build a research → draft → review → publish pipeline and actually understand what's happening at each stage — instead of debugging opaque string-passing between prompts.”