Comment by storystarling

I suspect the glued pipeline is going to remain dominant for a while, mostly because the intermediate text layer is structural, not just a byproduct. If you drop the text for a pure E2E model, you suddenly lose the ability to easily inject RAG context or handle complex tool use. I've been building some agent workflows recently and having that text state to pass into something like LangGraph is the only way to reliably control the logic. Without it, you are basically flying blind on the backend.