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.