Agent Techniques Weekly
From Chat to Cowork to Build to Automate.
A weekly field guide to agent techniques, harnesses, reusable skills, connectors, and credible proof of value.
The publication is tool-agnostic but tool-literate: OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft Copilot and Scout, Cursor, Hermes, OpenClaw, OpenCode, Lovable, and the broader agent ecosystem appear when they reveal a transferable way of working.
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- Issue 09/Week 25 of 2026/
Loop Engineering named the shift: the prompt is no longer the unit of work.
W25's launch issue puts a name on the operating shift. Loop Engineering means designing the cycle that wakes an agent, supplies context, lets it act, checks the result, retries or escalates, stores state, and knows when to stop. That is the move from using AI in a chat window to managing AI as a bounded coworker, builder, and background automation system.
- Issue 08/Week 24 of 2026/
Open-source harnesses pushed agents toward memory, channels, and self-improving skills.
W24's technique read is harness differentiation. OpenClaw-like systems emphasized channels and orchestration; Hermes-like systems emphasized memory and skill creation; OpenCode-like systems kept pressure on terminal-native building. The market signal is that 'agent' is no longer one thing: the harness decides whether the system is a coworker, a builder, a gateway, or an automation runtime.
- Issue 07/Week 23 of 2026/
Always-on personal agents made identity, policy, and audit trails first-class design problems.
W23's operating pattern is governed persistence. Once an agent can run in the background, touch files, coordinate calendars, or act across SaaS systems, the enterprise question changes from 'can it answer?' to 'who is it, what can it do, who approved it, and how do we inspect the trail?' Always-on agents are less a chatbot category than a new worker identity and control-plane category.
- Issue 06/Week 22 of 2026/
Domain agent packs showed that the next frontier is reusable professional workflow.
W22's technique read is domain packaging. Legal, security, sales, research, and engineering workflows are being bundled as repeatable agents, skills, connectors, and playbooks. The important move is not that a model can answer a professional question; it is that the workflow can load the right systems, apply the right rubric, produce a traceable draft, and leave the human in the judgment seat.
- Issue 05/Week 21 of 2026/
MCP and skills made the agent harness more important than the model choice.
W21's read is that agent performance is increasingly shaped by harness quality: what tools the agent can call, which skills it can load, what data it can reach, and what policy gates constrain action. Model quality still matters, but a stronger model inside a weak harness underperforms a capable model with the right connectors, memory, and verifier.
- Issue 04/Week 20 of 2026/
Subagents turned delegation from a single conversation into an agent team pattern.
W20's operating pattern is role separation. Instead of one assistant exploring, building, and grading its own work, agent harnesses increasingly split the job: one agent gathers context, one drafts the work, one reviews against the spec, and one verifies with tools. That matters because self-review is anchored; independent review raises the odds that agentic speed produces reliable output.
- Issue 03/Week 19 of 2026/
Agentic work became a review problem: the scarce skill is defining good and done.
W19's technique read is verification-first delegation. As coding agents, research agents, and office copilots take more steps on their own, the bottleneck moves to checks: tests, source trails, rubric reviews, approval gates, and separate critic passes. The teams getting real leverage are not asking agents to do more blindly; they are making the definition of done machine-checkable wherever possible.
- Issue 02/Week 18 of 2026/
The agent operating layer moved from prompt craft to repeatable delegation.
The first read starts where the market was already shifting: the interesting unit was no longer the best single prompt, but the repeatable way a human delegates work, supplies context, checks the answer, and teaches the system what to remember. The durable pattern is not a tool feature. It is an operating method that moves from chat to cowork to build to automate as the verification surface improves.
The methodology.
- — Explain the transferable technique before naming the tool.
- — Track new agent capabilities from OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Cursor, and major open-source harnesses.
- — Separate skills, connectors, plugins, and templates from product launches so reusable workflow primitives do not get buried.
- — Treat big value claims as provisional until the workflow, baseline, and verification method are visible.
- — Score every item through the enterprise lens: permissions, auditability, verification, data access, cost, and approval gates.
Operate. Publish. Teach.