Building AI Agents with Agno — I Actually Ran It with Gemini and Built-in Tools

If you've ever felt like LangChain was too heavy, you're not alone. The dependency tree is enormous. Abstraction layers pile up. At some point you lose track of what's actually happening underneath. That frustration has pushed a lot of people toward lighter alternatives — frameworks that prove you can build a capable agent without a hundred transitive dependencies. Agno is one of those alternatives. It started as Phidata and rebranded in early 2025. I spent an afternoon installing Agno v2.6.17...