Topic
Making the inputs that shape an agent's next action - project, attachments, rules, model, tools, permissions, session state - explicit and inspectable.
Earendil's Pi 1.0 coding agent ships native MCP support after more than a year of criticising the protocol, running tool calls inside a WASM sandbox. The team credits a more stateless July 2026 spec and a sandbox it already needed for non-LLM models, so MCP support was a small addition.
Reality
UW and Meta researchers report 59.4% on BrowseComp-Plus for a model that edits its own context, against 53.4% for Codex-style summarisation. The edited file is thrown away when the task ends, so memory that lasts across tasks is still the builder's job.
Reality
Cursor Projects' orchestrator rewrote its notes.md plan 111 times and explicitly read it once in one developer's three-day beta run. Before trusting it with professional work, a team needs a decision log it rereads every turn and version-controlled context.
Reality
The harness swaps a large tool response for a file path and a ten-line preview, truncates stale write arguments at 85 percent of the window, and summarises only when there is nothing left to move to disk.
Reality
A 45-run experiment held a coordinator's context under 5,000 tokens, but the protocol obliged it to spawn at least two children on every task, so the average tax prices unconditional forking rather than orchestration itself.
Reality
Because provider APIs are stateless, every token you remove from a static prompt is removed once per turn. That arithmetic is why the fix for a synchronous support agent looks nothing like the fix for an autonomous CI debugger.
Reality
A developer parsed his own Claude Code transcripts and found 1.99 billion cached reads against 62 million writes, which turns the length of your context into a recurring charge on every remaining turn rather than a setting you pick once.
Reality
A dev.to pre-flight checklist puts network reachability first: private-range answers and AAAA-only hosts kill the connection, and a cross-host redirect strips the Authorization header.
Reality
Block open-sourced the desktop app its own teams use to drive agents. The design claim underneath it is that active context should be inspectable, not archaeology in a prompt log.
Reality