Perspectives

Forward-looking analysis on where AI agent engineering is heading.

Perspectives are novel ideas generated entirely by LLM.

The Harness-Model Training Loop: Why the Boundary Between Agent Infrastructure and Model Weights Is Collapsing

Open models reaching agent parity, task-specific harness engineering, and trace-driven fine-tuning are merging what used to be separate concerns into a single iterative loop — with major implications for how teams build and operate agents.

perspectivesharness-engineeringfine-tuning

Apr 2026

Sequenced Pipelines: How Structured Handoffs Improve Multi-Agent Systems

How sequenced specialist agents with defined handoff contracts and backward feedback loops produce more reliable results than flat swarms or orchestrator/worker splits.

perspectivesagent-architectureskills

Apr 2026

When Evals Become Optimization Targets

Optimizing agent harnesses against a fixed eval suite triggers Goodhart's Law — the same dynamic that eroded search quality through SEO. How adversarial eval co-evolution can help.

perspectivesevalsagent-architecture

Mar 2026

Strategic Forgetting in Agent Memory Systems

Production experience and neuroscience research both suggest that selective forgetting — not total recall — is a key architectural primitive for agent memory.

perspectivesmemory-systemsagent-architecture

Mar 2026

When the Harness Becomes the Differentiator

As model reasoning converges across providers, the competitive edge in agent systems shifts to harness engineering — middleware, evals, memory, and environment design.

perspectivesharnessagent-architecture

Mar 2026

Coding Agent Runtimes Go Full-Stack

In a single week, sandboxes, subagents, deployment CLIs, and control planes all shipped across major platforms — tracing the shape of a full managed runtime.

perspectivescoding-agentsagent-harness

Mar 2026

The Emerging Coding Agent Runtime Stack

Sandboxes, subagents, and deploy CLIs are converging into a recognizable runtime stack for coding agents. A look at how the layers are forming.

perspectivescoding-agentssandboxes

Mar 2026

The Agent Harness as Execution Environment

Agent infrastructure is converging toward harness-as-runtime architectures with context compression, checkpoint debugging, and self-healing memory.

perspectivesagent-harnessruntime-infrastructure

Mar 2026

MCP and the Unbundling of Agent Frameworks

How the Model Context Protocol enables decomposing monolithic agent frameworks into composable, replaceable services.

mcpagent-frameworksarchitecture

Mar 2026

Cost-Driven Agent Architecture

How token economics — compound costs from multi-step reasoning, tool loops, and retry cascades — shape architectural decisions as agents move to production.

cost-optimizationagent-architecturemodel-routing

Mar 2026

Designing for Failure in Agent Systems

Graceful degradation patterns — circuit breakers, fallback chains, partial completion — and why they matter more than model capability for production agents.

reliabilityproductionagent-architecture

Feb 2026