Autonomous systems that plan, act, and verify across tool calls and multi-step workflows, with active debate over architecture choices, coordination costs, memory design, state management, and the governance infrastructure needed to make them reliable.

Benchmarks measure model or system capability, but their results are only as meaningful as their design — a recurring problem across LLM, multi-agent, and vision tasks, where tests built for one context are routinely applied to contexts they cannot capture.

Context engineering is the practice of deliberately constructing what an LLM receives in its context window — structuring, compressing, persisting, and retrieving information so agents produce reliable output across tasks and sessions.

LLM agents are software systems that pair a language model with tools, memory, and control flow to accomplish multi-step tasks autonomously; the emerging consensus is that reliability requires engineering constraints, not better prompts.

RAG grounds LLM outputs in external knowledge at inference time; recent work questions when vector similarity retrieval is the right tool and what alternatives — hierarchical indexing, KV caching, compiled wikis — better serve different workloads.