Blog / Field Notes

Periodic commentary on what is moving in agentic systems. A companion to Architecting Agentic Systems, time-bound where the book is stable.

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2026

• The hard part is the seams

  July 18, 2026

  The mid-2026 conversation has moved from whether to build agents to how to wire them together, and the recurring answer is that the hard parts live in the seams: the loop, the tool-call boundary, the trust between agents, the memory write path. The field is rediscovering the harness.

• Default to the workflow

  July 5, 2026

  What practitioners are saying about agentic systems in July 2026: reflexive agentification is losing ground to disciplined workflows, debugging is the open unsolved problem, and the three-placement oversight model is converging from practice and regulation as the EU AI Act deadline arrives.