The Agent Stack Is Quietly Consolidating Around long-context workflows

There is a version of this story that is mostly hype. There is another version, the one we are interested in, that is mostly engineering.

Inside Spotify, the rollout looked less like a moonshot and more like a slow migration. A pilot, a champion, a quiet expansion, a budget line.

Figma has been quietly running incident response through Glean for months. The results are unglamorous and, for that reason, more interesting than another benchmark chart.

What OpenAI actually shipped with DeepSeek V4 is less a single capability and more a cluster of small, compounding improvements — the kind that only show up when you put a real workflow on top.

Eval harnesses, once an afterthought, are becoming the most important piece of code in many AI projects. Shopify's team treats theirs the way an SRE team treats a runbook.

Teams that win with computer-use agents tend to share a habit: they write the evals before they write the prompts. Everything else follows from that.

None of this guarantees a clean story. Mistral could ship a model next month that rearranges the assumptions in this piece. But the direction of travel, for now, is clear enough to plan around.