# Google Agent Development Kit

16 Hacker News commenters recommended Google Agent Development Kit and 5 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 10 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free open-source framework for building AI agents, praised for clean abstractions and multi-language support. Critics call it unpolished and rapidly changing.

## Why people recommend it

- Well designed abstractions (5 comments): "It has a ton of day 2 features, really nice abstractions, and positioned itself well in terms of the building blocks and constructing workflows." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017442)) "I would place Google ADK in alignment with Kubernetes more than this project, for the well designed abstractions, the controlplane" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47681974)) "ADK is really well designed. We've used it as the harness for our main product since about January and it's been solid." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49115768))
- Handles bookkeeping and day-two features (4 comments): "It has a ton of day 2 features, really nice abstractions, and positioned itself well in terms of the building blocks and constructing workflows." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017442)) "handles all that bookkeeping for me, has a few options built in, and pretty easy to add new implementations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46258804)) "My agent framework (ADK) does this for free." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47203067))
- Runtime agnostic, multiple languages (3 comments): "ADK is great framework for building agents as it is runtime agnostic" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47047124)) "This is my goto SDK, it comes in multiple languages too." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50278109)) "I use ADK-go (also available in py, ts, java)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47017817))

## What people warn about

- Lacks local persistent memory (2 comments): "I really wish ADK had a local persistent memory implementation, though." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017486)) "I really with that things like Google ADK didn't add this to my deps." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50182168))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Claude Agent SDK](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-agent-sdk.md): 36 recommend
- [LangChain](https://hackerapproved.com/p/langchain.md): 32 recommend
- [Mastra](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mastra.md): 32 recommend
- [LangGraph](https://hackerapproved.com/p/langgraph.md): 31 recommend
- [DSPy](https://hackerapproved.com/p/dspy.md): 29 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Google Agent Development Kit", https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-adk/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).