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Stop Overengineering Your Agent Harness

The following originally appeared on Hugo Bowne-Anderson’s Vanishing Gradients Substack and is being republished here with the author’s permission. The conversation around harness engineering is dominated by problems from coding and personal agents such as OpenClaw, but most agents are simpler. Builders should avoid over-engineering for capabilities that newer models may absorb anyway, the β€œKirby […]

Managers Are Not Overhead: They Are Infrastructure

Managers have been disproportionate casualties of the rolling waves of post-COVID-19 tech layoffs that started in late 2022. Popularized by large companies such as Meta, Google, and Amazon, phrases like β€œflattening the org” and β€œreducing bureaucracy” are now synonymous with thinning the management layers that ballooned during the 2021–2022 hiring sprees. Retrospectively, such flattening can […]

My AI Kept Pushing Me to Ship, So I Asked It Why

I’ve been working on the Quality Playbook, my open source AI skill that uses quality engineering to find bugs that normal AI code review misses, and I recently had a batch of work that turned into a long run of point releases. I was using Claude Cowork as the orchestrator: planning scope, dispatching instructions to […]

Zero to Agent in 30 Minutes: Build a Workflow Agent with John Berryman

We kicked off Zero to Agent in 30 Minutes this week with guest John Berryman, an AI consultant and contractor for Arcturus Labs. John has spent the past several years building AI products and consulting on how teams put them into production. He set the stage by defining an agent as a large language model […]

The Tokens You Can’t Wait For

Somewhere in a Singapore data center, a bank is paying for eight H100s that spend most of the night waiting. The cluster was bought for good reasons (discomfort with customer documents leaving the building, a strategy team’s aversion to lock-in), so the bank secured its own sovereign compute. Now the finance team is asking why […]

This Week in AI: A First for Agentic Ransomware

Christina Stathopoulos, the data and AI evangelist behind Dare to Data, continued her run sorting the week’s most impactful stories into a handful of themes we’ve been watching play out over the past month: more firms investing in the compute AI runs on, more concerns about who controls a model’s borders, and more AI-generated code […]

The Right Amount of Spec for Agentic Development

I keep seeing the same idea in conversations about agents: Detailed specs are old-world overhead now. Give the model a rough goal, let it explore, fix what comes back, move on. It sounds efficient but it also hides the cost. A simple prompt looks cheap and tempting because it gets implementation started right away. Then […]

Coding Was Never a Bottleneck

AI has taken software development by storm.Β Between the two of us, we build products for software engineers and consumer products for millions of everyday users, so we have skin in the game. We want the AI productivity story to be true. More output, tighter timelines, happier and more productive engineers. Who wouldn’t? But when we […]

Ending the estrangement of Congress and the Pentagon

This could transform how Congress and the Pentagon understand each other and share information, making the relationship more secure, flexible and responsive.

Β© The Associated Press

FILE - The Pentagon is seen from Air Force One as it flies over Washington, March 2, 2022. Defense officials tell Congress that the military services are still reviewing possible discipline of troops who refused the order to get the COVID-19 vaccine. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

Don’t Neglect the Operational Groundwork

Autonomous agents are moving faster than the field’s ability to govern them, and catching up requires more than better prompts or bigger sandboxes. At O’Reilly’s recent AI Superstream focused on OpenClaw and the broader ecosystem of locally run and self-hosted AI agents, five speakers, each working at a different layer of the stack, explored patterns […]
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