These seven tools are not one product category: LangGraph, MAF, and Mastra emphasize durable workflows; CrewAI and AG2 emphasize multi-agent collaboration; Pydantic AI emphasizes typed Python agents; DSPy optimizes AI programs against data and metrics. Choose the control model first.
DSPy replaces handwritten prompt strings with task Signatures, execution Modules, and Optimizers that compile better instructions and examples against a dataset and metric.
CS224U's teaching material isn't a slide deck — it's an Apache-2.0 GitHub repo holding the lecture notebooks, all three assignments, and the grading document for the final project. But the on-campus course has skipped three straight academic years since Spring 2023, and ExploreCourses has it back on the books for Spring 2026-27. The official description still lists relation extraction and semantic parsing; the 2023 syllabus covers neither. And the data-loading cell in the first assignment breaks in a fresh environment today, on a Hugging Face compatibility change.
CS329Z is a new three-unit agent engineering course debuting at Stanford in Autumn 2026. Its first homework asks you to build RAG, tool calling and a ReAct loop from scratch with litellm, then rewrite the same components in DSPy and hand in the comparison. The course site lives in a public GitHub repo, and the commit log shows the assignment count dropping from three to two in mid-August — the one that got cut was 'Data for Agents'.