Latent Space: The 5 Trends That Defined AI Engineering at World's Fair 2026 — 'Building Systems Around Agents, Not Just With Them'
Latent Space's synthesis of AIE World's Fair 2026 argues the discipline shifted from building agents to engineering the harness around them: Lilian Weng (Thinking Machines Lab) reframed her work as 'harness engineering,' Anthropic's Thariq Shihipar said 'models are grown, not designed,' and Addy Osmani cast the human 'outer loop' as the real engineering surface. The other three trends — enterprise Forward Deployed Engineers (Sierra, Cursor, Warp), coding agents replacing IDEs (Vercel's eve, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI), and 'skills as files' (Philipp Schmid: 'agents are just files… we write markdown files to extend capabilities') — map almost exactly onto how a solo builder should structure a pipeline today. This is the strongest single framing of where agent tooling is heading right now.
↳ Follow the thread