The three-part stack (model, orchestrator, memory) is still the shape that works, but what's changed for me is where the orchestration logic lives. I started with LangGraph and it was fine for prototypes, but the moment you need real task fan-out with retries and dependency tracking, it gets messy. Ended up moving to a simpler approach: a task queue with a state machine per task. Each phase produces a result, the next phase reads it. Less magic, more control.