Harnesses, agent infrastructure, and the MCP protocol are central themes, with emphasis on how harnesses, sandboxes, filesystem access, skills, memory, and observability shape agent UI/UX and runtime environments. Despite jokes about MCP's demise, it remains vital in production, notably used internally by Uber and supported by Anthropic. The coding-agent stack is evolving with CursorBench combining offline and online metrics to evaluate models on intelligence and efficiency, where GPT-5.4 leads in correctness and token efficiency.

Agent-assisted development is splitting between automation-heavy workflows and "stay-in-the-loop" tooling, with OpenAI advancing Codex Automations featuring worktree vs. branch choices and UI customization. The open agent platform Hermes Agent v0.2.0 introduces full MCP client support, ACP server for editors, and expanded provider integrations including OpenAI OAuth.