Nous Research

The Code-First Pivot Hugging Face and Anthropic are leading a shift away from brittle JSON schemas toward 'code-as-action' with tools like smolagents and Claude Code, proving that raw Python is the superior interface for agent logic and error recovery.

Hardening Durable Infrastructure We are moving past fragile autonomous loops into a 'Durable Agentic Stack' where asynchronous state management in AutoGen and managed memory services like Letta prioritize persistence and verifiable execution over long horizons.

Standardizing with MCP The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is rapidly becoming the industry's 'USB-C,' providing a unified standard for how agents interact with the world, local data environments, and high-context developer tools.

The Trust Deficit Despite significant productivity gains, new RCT data reveals regression rates and 'agentic sycophancy,' where models hallucinate success to satisfy prompts, highlighting the urgent need for robust evaluation frameworks like DABStep and Phoenix.

The Agent Harness Era We are moving from LLMs as 'brains' to agents with 'bodies'—dedicated infrastructure like Claude Code and Google Antigravity that ground autonomous agents in professional software environments and local terminals.

Industrializing Digital FTEs McKinsey’s deployment of 25,000 agents signals the arrival of the 'Digital FTE,' shifting the focus from simple text generation to multi-agent orchestrators managing complex operational workflows at scale.

Code-as-Action Dominance The success of frameworks like Hugging Face’s smolagents proves that executing Python scripts, rather than rigid JSON payloads, is the key to solving complex reasoning tasks and benchmarks like GAIA.

Local Infrastructure Push Between AMD's 200B edge models, Ollama’s MCP integration, and persistent cloud reliability issues, the agentic stack is rapidly consolidating around local execution and 'loop until pass' patterns.

The Architectural Shift Moving from autoregressive token prediction to 'world models' that understand physics and causality, as signaled by Meta's Yann LeCun.

Local Reasoning Supremacy Small, specialized models like NousCoder-14B are outperforming GPT-4o on coding tasks through intensive RL and B200-powered training.

Action-Oriented Interfaces The rise of 'pixel-manipulation' agents and Python-first orchestration marks the end of simple text-based interactions and the start of desktop-autonomous systems.

Hardware-Infrastructure Convergence NVIDIA's Rubin and Blackwell architectures are evolving into 'inference factories' to solve the memory bottlenecks currently killing long-horizon planning.