Are we building AI agents wrong? ReAct is becoming a bottleneck for task automation

Been thinking about this a lot lately and wanted to get some opinions from people who are actually in the weeds with this stuff.

Most of the agent frameworks right now are built around ReAct (Reasoning + Acting), and for a lot of use cases it works fine. But I think there's a growing mismatch between what people actually expect from agents, automating real-world tasks, workflows, ETL processes, and what ReAct can realistically deliver.

Some of the pain points I keep running into:

• Context window exhaustion: Any non-trivial ETL or data pipeline chews through your context fast. ReAct is inherently sequential and verbose. You're paying token cost for reasoning traces that don't need to be there.
• Multi-tool calls: ReAct is inefficient here. Each action-observation loop adds overhead, and you can't parallelize easily. For workflows that need to fan out across multiple tools simultaneously, it breaks down.
• Data processing and calculations: The model is doing heavy lifting it shouldn't be doing. Reasoning about numbers step by step in natural language is fragile and slow compared to just... running code.
• No real async story: Most implementations are blocking. For anything resembling a real automation workflow this is a serious constraint.

I think CodeAct (having the agent write and execute code rather than call tools declaratively) has a much stronger foundation for this use case. You get native async, proper data handling, real computational power, and you can compress complex multi-step logic into a single generation.

But even then, I think the bigger unsolved problem is the abstractions, how do you correctly scope what an agent is allowed to do? How do you build intuition into the system for when it should pause and ask for confirmation vs. when it can just proceed? These feel like the actual hard problems for anyone building serious task automation.

Curious if others have hit these walls and what your approaches have been. Is ReAct good enough for your use cases or are you working around its limitations constantly?

(Dropping some links in the comments if anyone wants to dig into this more)