It's been over a year since we have seen agents, harnesses and AI go fully mainstream.
I used to run an AI consulting firm called Transfrm Labs, so this is mainly my 2 cents on things I found interesting.
I spent the last few months building through it, mostly in the open: cheap inference, local models, verifiable output. A dozen repos, most of them papers I didn't quite believe and rebuilt to check.
TLDR of what I learned:
- The model is a commodity now. Same one your competitor rents, same price, on a schedule neither of you controls. The system around it is what you own.
- Local is real. KV-cache compression buys 3-5x more context on a laptop. A 4B model you control beats a frontier API for most production work.
- Long context is a programming problem. Stop stuffing the window. Recursive setups go from 0% to 91% on million-token tasks.
- Stop hand-writing prompts. With a good eval, the system optimizes them itself.
- Never trust one model call. Cross-check across model families. Verification is the product.
- Agents are still amnesiacs. Memory and a real harness matter more than the model.
Link in the comments. Views personal.