Agentic tooling (umbrella)
The tools for building and running LLM agents — everything wrapped around a frontier model to turn it from a text generator into a system that does work. This wiki’s umbrella concept. Its premise, drawn straight from the corpus: the model writes the code; the value has moved to everything around it. That “everything” decomposes into the layers the synthesis tracks:
- Capability as portable markdown — domain skills bundled as files an agent loads at runtime (agent-skills cross-wiki), hardening into an open cross-vendor standard (agentskills-spec) alongside its sibling conventions agents-md and model-context-protocol (skills × MCP = agency).
- Structure around the model — the agentic-coding-harness and its composable agent-middleware: phase gates, deterministic tools, and confidence grading that let structure substitute for raw capability.
- Execution & authoring — agent-orchestration (orchestrator → parallel-subagent fan-out) at run time, spec-driven-development at authoring time, and the shift from prompt to loop — goal + stop-condition + feedback signal — where the bottleneck becomes verification, not generation.
- Durability & self-improvement — durable-agents that pause/resume across crashes, self-improving-agents that author and refine their own skills, over an agent-memory state substrate.
- Bounds — agent-guardrails: autonomy capped by reversibility, human checkpoints on the irreversible — the counterweight to the autonomy push above.
The through-line
Across every layer the same bet recurs: structure, not model size, is the lever. Skills, harnesses, loops, durability, and guardrails are all reliability engineering around a capability you don’t control — which is why the open question the spoke keeps returning to is whether structure really substitutes for capability, and how far. See synthesis.