Agents choke on context, loop on failures, and dump walls of code for review. It's time to rethink the architecture.
The End of Code Review: Coding Agents Supersede Human Inspection
Code review has been the primary quality gate in software development since Fagan formalised code inspection in 1976. For five decades, having a human examine and comment on a colleague's changes before merge has been a cornerstone practice at organisations of every size. Coding agents are large language model (LLM)-based autonomous systems capable of reading, writing, testing, and repairing software. We argue that coding agents have crossed a threshold of capability at which traditional human code review is no longer a necessary component of a software quality pipeline. Our argument rests on two claims: every stated goal of code review can be served by agents at lower cost and higher throughput; the naive integration in which agents write code and humans remain the mandatory reviewers is a dead end because it neither provides meaningful assurance nor scales with AI-assisted throughput.
Agentic Engineering Management
To what extent AI is OK to use in software development might be debated, but in general, the idea is not a controversial one anymore. The debate rather moved on from code completion and simple PR summarizations to Agentic Engineering, where an execution loop allows an AI Agent to function
Agent Skills
AI coding agents take the shortest path to done, which usually means skipping the specs, tests, and reviews that make software reliable at scale. Agent Skill...
Agent READMEs: An Empirical Study of Context Files for Agentic Coding
Agentic coding tools receive goals written in natural language, break them down into specific tasks, and write or execute code with minimal human intervention. Central to this process are agent context files (e.g., AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md) that provide persistent, project-level instructions. In this paper, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study of 2,303 agent context files from 1,925 repositories to characterize their structure, maintenance, and content. We find that these files are not static documentation but complex, difficultto-read artifacts that evolve like configuration code through frequent, small additions. Our content analysis of 16 instruction types shows that developers prioritize functional context, such as test procedures (75.9%), implementation details (70.8%), and architecture (68.1%). We also identify a significant gap: non-functional requirements such as security (14.8%) and performance (14.5%) are rarely specified. These findings indicate that while developers use context files to make agents functional, they provide few guardrails to ensure that agent-written code is secure or performant, highlighting the need for improved tools and practices.
Building and evaluating AI Agents — Sayash Kapoor, AI Snake Oil
Building the agentic cloud: everything we launched during Agents Week 2026
Agents Week 2026 is a wrap. Let’s take a look at everything we announced, from compute and security to the agent toolbox, platform tools, and the emerging agentic web. Everything we shipped for the agentic cloud.
Does Code Cleanliness Affect Coding Agents? A Controlled Minimal-Pair Study
As autonomous coding agents see rapid adoption, their evaluation has primarily focused on task completion rates holding the target codebase fixed. This leaves a critical question unanswered: does the structural and stylistic quality, or ``cleanliness'' of the underlying code affect an agent's ability to navigate and modify it? To isolate the effect of code cleanliness from agent capability, we introduce an evaluation protocol built around minimal pairs: repositories that match on architecture, dependencies, and external behaviour, but differ on static-analysis rule violations and cognitive complexity. The pairs are constructed in both directions, by agent pipelines that either degrade a clean repository or clean a messy one. We author 33 tasks across six such pairs, evaluated through hidden tests at the application's public surface. Across 660 trials with Claude Code, code cleanliness does not change the agent's pass rate. However, it substantially alters the agent's operational footprint: agents working on cleaner code use 7 to 8% fewer tokens and reduce file revisitations by 34%. Our findings suggest that traditional maintainability principles remain highly relevant in the era of AI-driven development, shaping the computational cost and navigational efficiency of coding agents. Code cleanliness joins model choice, harness, and prompting as a factor that materially affects agent behaviours.
SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?
Large Language Model (LLM) agents have been widely adopted in modern software development workflows. SWE-bench [13] and related works [23, 24, 22, 25, 15] establish the task of issue resolution as a de-facto standard for assessing their capability and usefulness. In this setting, an agent is given an entire codebase, a task description (e.g., a bug report or feature request) in natural language and is instructed to produce a code patch that resolves the issue and passes the repository’s test suite. These benchmarks have been instrumental in demonstrating both the substantial potential and the persistent limitations of current models as SWE agents.
The Agent Harness
A specification for agent behavior that LLM frameworks leave undefined: error handling, context management, tool execution, and state transitions.
New capabilities for building agents on the Anthropic API | Claude
Claude now offers code execution, MCP server connections, file storage, and extended prompt caching through the API—giving developers powerful tools to build agents that analyze data, connect to external systems, and maintain context for longer periods of time.
Project Think: building the next generation of AI agents on Cloudflare
Announcing a preview of the next edition of the Agents SDK — from lightweight primitives to a batteries-included platform for AI agents that think, act, and persist.
Prime Intellect - The Open Stack for Self-Improving Agents
The compute and infrastructure platform for you to train, evaluate, and deploy your own agentic models.
Prime Intellect - The Open Stack for Self-Improving Agents
The compute and infrastructure platform for you to train, evaluate, and deploy your own agentic models.