I see a great tension in the market today. On one hand you want agents to work reliably and that needs a lot of harness, computer use, model routine, tasks running longer etc. And on other hand you simply want to reduce your dependencies and costs.
Agent building is very nascent and all the frontier companies are trying to build the best harnesses possible.
As basic prompting, researching, coding gets mature, more and more of such tasks will be optimal for model routing open source etc etc but there is a chance that by that time frontier models again make costs and routing, low and effortless.
Basically I believe everyone has started jumping to the. -- REAL PROBLEM IS COST v. REAL PROBLEM IS EFFICIENT, RELIABLE AGENTS/WORKFLOWS.
It's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out.
i'm tired of this narrative about switching to open source models. If people wanted to switch... well they would have switched!
The amount of effort Anthropic and OpenAI are putting behind inference, harness, building great agentic applications on top of the frontier model... IS NOT A SMALL THING.
Think about it, if you want to use an open source model to run an agent over long horizons, you need someone to offer it reliably. And if all compute goes to frontier models there is very little left for even startups to build agentic companies on top of these open source models.
I totally support you guys so don't take it as a dig!
But isn't this mindblowing that while you were building and launching, Opus 4.8 launched and made a bunch of things you mentioned above irrelevant? for example, memory between sessions is way better, dynamic workflows will spin up a ton of agents to do work in parallel, and the ecosystem must provide better apis to be relevant (salesforce, uipath goind headless).
Again always support startups so cheering for you, but man things are changing so fast!
research skills break differently than dev skills. dev skills want determinism. research skills have to retain the wrong turns, or you've stripped the actual artifact. worth knowing what your skill flow logs before you trust the output to write up.
recursive skill-building's the obvious move. the missing piece is outcome tracking. without knowing which skill closed which loop, "deliberate" just means "you made one." the loop closes on the data, not the demo.