Agent Tools

Six-hour agent runs are now real. The harness — checkpoints, durable state, recovery — matters more than the model. A field guide to the long-running pattern.

Anthropic shipped a lot on May 6 — Managed Agents updates, Dreaming, Outcomes, Multi-agent Orchestration, and a SpaceX partnership. The signal-to-noise filtered down to five things that change how you build.

Langfuse got acquired by ClickHouse. Helicone hit maintenance mode. OpenTelemetry standardized LLM tracing. The observability stack for agents reshuffled in three months. Here's what it looks like now.

Vibes-based scoring is finally dying. Trajectory eval, rubric eval, golden replay, and the test pyramid that production agent teams actually run.

Firecracker microVMs, gVisor containers, persistent workspaces, and the $24M Series A nobody quite expected. The sandbox layer beneath every serious agent — and how to pick the right one.

Caching, routing, distillation, and per-task model selection. The four moves that take a $0.40/task agent to $0.04/task without anyone noticing the difference.

Operator died, Browser Use became the default substrate, Manus shipped at scale, and the gap between demo and reliable production narrowed considerably. A field report.

The three-role pattern that powered Manus, then LangChain Deep Agents, then half the production agents shipping in early 2026. Why it works, when it doesn't, and how to actually build one.

Past ~30 tools, agent reliability falls off a cliff. Past ~100, it's chaos. Here's the actual engineering — RAG-over-tools, semantic routing, dynamic loading, and namespacing — that production teams ship to stay sane.

The orchestrator-worker pattern that took over agent design in late 2025 is the same pattern that took over backend design in 2014. The wins are real. So are the failure modes.

Six serious frameworks, four orchestration styles, and one tired question I keep getting asked. Here's the decision tree I actually use.

Fourteen months in, the Model Context Protocol stopped being a curiosity and started being plumbing. Here's what changed over the holidays — registries, governance, and the first scaling pains.