Design Principles

Control > Convenience: Explicit systems outperform hidden automation.

Context > Prompting: Prompt engineering helps. Context engineering scales,  it is now treated as the discipline of designing everything a model sees on every inference call, not just the instruction text.

Memory is First-Class: Persistent memory enables continuity and personalization, with its own benchmark suite and tiering rather than a single vector store.

Tools Define Boundaries: Tool permissions are governance mechanisms; MCP scopes and OAuth are now the default enforcement layer.

Verification for High Stakes: Critical outputs require secondary review.

Autonomy Must Be Observable: Every decision must be traceable,  AgentOps has emerged as its own discipline for this.

Trustworthy Memory > Large Memory: Untrusted memory creates systemic failures, including memory poisoning.

Intelligence Should Scale with Difficulty: Use model routing for cost and speed efficiency.

Harness > Model (New): The harness — prompts, tools, memory, orchestration, and guardrails around a frozen model — is now the primary lever for reliability, not the raw model choice.