Sep 16, 2026

The unreasonable effectiveness of BM25 for agentic search — Jo Kristian Bergum, Hornet.dev

Jo Kristian Bergum argues that the 30-year-old lexical search function BM25 is making a powerful comeback, not because it has changed, but because LLM agents are fundamentally different and more capable users. He highlights how these agents, with their general knowledge and ability to formulate complex queries, leverage BM25's strengths. Using the Browsecom+ benchmark, he demonstrates that reasoning isn't the bottleneck for LLMs, but effective retrieval and query formulation are. He advocates for a "file system workspace" approach, allowing models to use their existing coding and bash skills to interact with retrieved documents, signaling a shift in how search systems are designed and evaluated for agentic applications.

Sep 09, 2026

500 Skills, Zero Fine-Tuning: LinkedIn's Playbook for AI Agents — Ajay Prakash, LinkedIn

LinkedIn revolutionized its approach to AI agents by addressing the inherent limitations of LLMs in complex enterprise environments. Facing issues like hallucinations due to a lack of internal context, they developed a system of "playbooks" — structured, self-contained instructions published as tools. To scale beyond typical MCP limitations, they introduced three meta-tools (search, get schema, execute), enabling agents to dynamically discover and utilize thousands of internal tools and playbooks. This self-improving, context-aware infrastructure empowers agents to handle tasks from incident response to code generation, significantly boosting developer productivity and ensuring reliability.

Sep 01, 2026

Agent Spending Without Controls — Rodrigo Coelho & Pranav Maheshwari, Edge & Node

Ampersand presents the critical need for a new payment infrastructure for AI agents, moving beyond traditional human-centric rails to address machine-speed transactions and stringent enterprise compliance requirements. The presentation highlights how agents require access to paid tools via a "skill file" and demonstrates agentic e-commerce, culminating in a crucial demo of real-time sanctions screening for wallet addresses.

Aug 15, 2026

Exo: Harnesses should see their own code and logs — Alex Krentsel

An introduction to Exo, a fully recursive AI agent harnessing a novel three-layer architecture (Executor, Harness, Sandbox) designed for autonomous self-improvement. It delves into how Exo surpasses current agent limitations by allowing the agent to edit its own code and policy at runtime, ensuring protected state and isolated execution, and discusses practical implications and the underlying systems philosophy enabling this paradigm shift.

Aug 13, 2026

When to Build Your Own Agent Harness | Harrison Chase, LangChain

Harrison Chase, co-founder of LangChain, delves into the critical role of the 'harness' in LLM agents, explaining how it orchestrates models and context. He covers customizing harnesses with middleware and sub-agents, the trade-offs between off-the-shelf and custom solutions for in- and out-of-distribution tasks, and the importance of evaluations and observability for continuous agent improvement. The discussion culminates in the 'data flywheel' concept and the `LangSmith Engine` for automating agent intelligence through iterative refinement.

Aug 11, 2026

Evolution of agentic surfaces — Gagan Bhat & Isabella Kai He, Anthropic

Anthropic's Gagan Bhat and Isabella Kai He discuss how agent harnesses must evolve rapidly to keep pace with fast-improving LLMs. They introduce Claude Managed Agents, an architecture that decouples the agent's 'brain' (reasoning) from its 'hands' (tool execution) to address issues like stale assumptions, latency, and reliability. This approach enables dynamic adaptation, secure tool execution, and features like 'dreaming' for self-improving agents and 'outcomes' for goal-oriented task completion, ultimately aiming to close the gap between model capabilities and product offerings.