Understanding Bugs in Modern Agentic Frameworks: A Study of Symptoms, Root Causes, and Triggering Conditions

Modern agentic frameworks such as CrewAI and AutoGen have evolved into complex, autonomous multi-agent systems, introducing reliability challenges that go beyond earlier pipeline-based LLM libraries. However, existing empirical studies focus on earlier LLM libraries or task-level bugs, leaving the unique complexities of these agentic frameworks unexplored. We present a comprehensive study of 409 fixed bugs across five representative agentic frameworks, proposing a five-layer architectural abstraction. Our taxonomy identifies previously unreported symptom categories---Unexpected Execution Sequence, User Configuration Ignored, and Incomplete/Incorrect Trace---and isolates agent-specific root causes including Model-Related Fault, Cognitive Context Mismanagement, and Orchestration Fault. Notably, the model integration layer is the most bug-prone yet receives disproportionately low test inclusion rate during bug fixing (47%), revealing a critical validation gap. Despite varying design paradigms, bug symptoms, root causes, and bug-prone components show substantial cross-framework consistency (JS similarity 0.62--0.88). Finally, we present the first systematic study of bug-triggering conditions, identifying error-prone factor combinations across element configurations, input patterns, and operations, and demonstrate their transferability across frameworks, providing a foundation for test oracle design and cross-framework benchmark.