Google's ADK vs Managed Agents: who owns the agent loop decides
rseroter · x · 2026-08-18
SeraAndroid shares a decision rule for choosing between ADK (Agent Development Kit) and Managed Agents in the Gemini API: it comes down to who owns the agent loop.
- ADK: when the workflow is part of your application. ADK gives control over agent topology, deterministic graph steps, routing, human approval, state, callbacks, evaluation and deployment — suited to long-lived systems where you define exactly how work moves between agents and what happens on failure.
- Managed Agent: when delegating a bounded task to a complete hosted agent runtime.
The Interactions API is the unified interface for both Gemini models and agents: specify a model for inference or an agent for autonomous work. The Antigravity agent gets a Google-hosted Linux sandbox to run Bash, Python and Node.js, manage files, browse the web, and mount repositories or data.
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