The Post-Link Web: What agent mode Means for Publishers
Inside the quiet rewiring of code review at Snowflake.
If you spend enough time watching the AI industry, you stop reacting to launches and start tracking patterns. The Post-Link Web is one of those patterns.
The skeptical read is that we are watching a feature, not a platform. The optimistic read is that structured outputs is exactly the kind of feature that becomes a platform when nobody is paying attention.
Teams that win with tool-first agents tend to share a habit: they write the evals before they write the prompts. Everything else follows from that.
Eval harnesses, once an afterthought, are becoming the most important piece of code in many AI projects. Duolingo's team treats theirs the way an SRE team treats a runbook.
The cost curve matters here. Gemini 3 Pro is roughly an order of magnitude cheaper per token than the equivalent model 18 months ago, and that changes which problems are worth automating at all.
Eval harnesses, once an afterthought, are becoming the most important piece of code in many AI projects. Snowflake's team treats theirs the way an SRE team treats a runbook.
The skeptical read is that we are watching a feature, not a platform. The optimistic read is that long context is exactly the kind of feature that becomes a platform when nobody is paying attention.
Teams that win with long-context workflows 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. DeepSeek 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.