Eight more months of agents

Eight more months of agents 2026-02-08 I wrote up my experiences programming with LLMs a bit over a year ago, and updated it for the world of agents eight months ago. A lot has changed since then, so here is an update. Agents have improved dramatically in a year We were prototyping our first agent, Sketch, when Claude Code was released 12 months ago. So I, by good fortune, got to be there and be excited right at the beginning. They could be helpful for some things some of the time! Agent harnesses have not improved much since then. There are things Sketch could do well six months ago that the most popular agents cannot do today. The agent harness is critical, there is plenty of innovation to be done there, but it is as interesting a space right now as compiler optimizations were during the megahertz explosion of the 1990s. Right now, it is all about the model. And on the models: there are plenty of public benchmarks but they have all been gamed to death. Ignore them. Clearly the…