Decoder-only LLMs took all the oxygen, but the model quietly doing your retrieval, reranking, and classification is still a small bidirectional encoder — and in late 2024 it finally got a 2024-era redesign.
A year on, the data is in — almost nobody reads your llms.txt. The files that move the needle are the one that blocks crawlers and the content that earns a citation.
One framework makes you draw the control-flow graph up front; the other lets it emerge from events. Pick by whether your hardest requirement is durable recovery or flexible composition.
Your engine computes a KV cache, uses it once, and throws it away. Offloading turns that scratchpad into a shared storage tier — and changes the question you should be asking.
Four open-weight MoE models now run real agents. The headline parameter counts are nearly decorative — pick by active params and post-training, not by the leaderboard screenshot.
The way you start an agent — schedule, HTTP event, or message queue — decides its retry, durability, and concurrency behavior more than the framework you write it in does.
A max-step counter is the reflex, and it's necessary — but it caps the damage without fixing the cause. Agents loop because the thing they see never changes, and that's a fixable problem.
Durable execution and checkpointing give you at-least-once replay, which is strictly worse for side-effecting tools — unless you attach a stable idempotency key before the call, not after the crash.
Loading every tool definition upfront doesn't just burn context — it tanks tool selection. The fix has three shapes: tool search, tool-RAG, and code execution. Pick by what you retrieve, and when.
Print statements debug code. But the agent's code did exactly what it was told — the bug is in the context the model saw and the decision it made there. You debug an agent by reading transcripts, not by stepping through functions.
Google's Antigravity, Cursor, and Claude Code now all hit ~80% on SWE-bench. So the real difference isn't who writes better code — it's where each one puts the work of checking it.
Google's Genkit is the framework that bundles the parts the others sell separately. The real choice isn't features — it's where your code runs and how much of your ops you want the framework to own.
Three ways to keep an agent's untrusted code off your host kernel — and why the right choice is a triangle of compatibility, cold-start speed, and operational weight, not a security ranking.
The bottleneck in a coding agent isn't the smart model deciding what to change. It's the dull mechanical work of writing that change to disk correctly — and that's a different model entirely.
Storing embeddings at full precision is a tax most RAG systems don't need to pay. Binary cuts memory 32x — and the trick that buys the quality back is cheaper than the savings.
The async coding agents have all converged on the same shape — a cloud VM that clones your repo, runs the tests, and opens a PR. So the thing you're actually choosing isn't the coder. It's the harness and who reviews the flood.
DeepSeek's October paper shows vision tokens can carry roughly 10x the text of text tokens at ~97% fidelity — which quietly reframes long context as a compression problem, not a capacity one.
A long-running agent fails when its window fills with stale tool output. Anthropic ships three levers for that — and the trap is treating them as competitors instead of a division of labor.
The two best coding agents disagree at the architecture level on how to find the right code. One builds a vector index of your repo; the other threw the index away and runs grep. The split is about freshness, not accuracy.
One paradigm has an agent write a Python snippet as its action; the other has it emit a structured JSON tool call. The 20% accuracy gap everyone quotes is real — but only on the tasks where it applies.
They both promise durable, resumable agents — but one is a place to run code and the other is a way to structure it. Confusing the two is how teams end up with neither.
The eval-tooling field just split into three camps and lost two players to acquisition in a single month. Pick on philosophy and independence, not the feature grid.
The B200's headline 5-6x throughput jump is two different upgrades wearing one number — bigger HBM and FP4 compute — and which one matters depends entirely on whether your workload is memory-bound or compute-bound.
A Stanford/SambaNova method called ACE lets an agent get better by editing its own context instead of its weights — and the trick is to grow that context, not compress it.
An LLM judge scores the final answer. For a multi-step agent, that signal is sparse, late, and easy to fool — a broken trajectory can still land on a right answer, and you'd never know.
Three platforms that look like competitors but optimize for different primary jobs, with lock-in profiles that diverge sharply once you read the fine print.
A deep agent is not a new model or a framework breakthrough — it's four cheap, known ingredients that let a plain tool-calling loop survive a long task instead of drifting.
Most teams buy one vector store and call it 'memory.' It solves exactly one of the four problems — which is why the agent still loses the thread and repeats yesterday's mistake.
Both spend N times the inference to make a model smarter. The difference is how they choose the winner — and that choice decides which tasks each one can help.