Stanford

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.

Standardized Agent Communication Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) is becoming the 'USB for agents,' solving the integration friction that has long plagued agentic development and tool-use.

Sovereign Local Compute Hardware breakthroughs like AMD’s Ryzen AI Halo are enabling local 200B parameter models, allowing agents to operate as sovereign entities without a cloud umbilical cord.

Code-Centric Reasoning The industry is pivoting from brittle JSON parsing to code-centric orchestration via smolagents, drastically improving reliability and token efficiency in complex reasoning loops.

Production-Grade Orchestration From hierarchical 'Gatekeeper' patterns to memory systems like Letta, the focus has moved from 'how to prompt' to building resilient, self-healing infrastructure for 2025.