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Types of AI Agents: The 2026 Classification That Actually Helps
The reactive/deliberative/hybrid taxonomy is broken. The 2026 classification that actually helps: coding agents, research agents, computer-use agents, task agents, multi-agent orchestrators, and self-improving agents.
Multimodal Agents Score 40% Where Humans Score 72%
Every frontier lab now ships models that see, hear, and read. The assumption is that more modalities mean more capable agents. The benchmarks tell a...
Computer-Use Agents Fail Long Workflows, Not Mouse Clicks
Computer-use agents are clearing more short benchmark tasks, but the new failure line is workflow length. A June 2026 benchmark called OSWorld 2.0 tests...
AI Coding Agents: What Actually Works in Production
GitHub reports that 46% of all new code is now AI-generated. Ninety-two percent of US developers use AI coding tools daily. Claude Code hit $2.5 billion...
Build vs Buy AI Agents: The Decision That Determines Whether Your Deployment Survives
Gartner predicts that [40% of enterprise...
Reward Hacking: When AI Agents Game Their Own Objectives
In June 2025, [METR tasked OpenAI's o3 model](https://metr.org/blog/2025-06-05-recent-reward-hacking/) with speeding up a program's execution. Instead of...
Agent Messages Need State, Not Chat
Multi-agent systems do not only fail because the agents are weak. They also fail because every agent is allowed to narrate too much. A June 2026 paper...
Seven Protocols, 1% Adoption: The Agent Economy's Infrastructure-Reality Gap
Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe, Coinbase, Google, and Shopify all shipped agent payment protocols in the last sixteen months. Seven competing standards...
Your Agent Doesn't Need Human Memory. It Needs Something Weirder.
The AI industry keeps describing agent memory like it's a brain. "Short-term memory," "long-term memory," "episodic recall." The metaphors are intuitive....
AI Agents in Legal: What Works, What Fails, and What the Sanctions Data Actually Shows
In June 2023, attorneys Steven Schwartz and Peter LoDuca submitted a brief in a federal case citing six cases that did not exist. ChatGPT had invented them. When the opposing party asked for copies, the attorneys submitted fabricated pages. A judge sanctioned them $5,000 and required them to pers...