Gu (2026)
Future gains in long-horizon agents depend as much on the system built around the model as on the model itself
This position paper argues that the harness, the memory, context, skill-routing, orchestration and governance layers around a foundation model, should be designed, evaluated and scaled as a first-class object, and proposes a research agenda.
- Six components
- make up an agent in this framework: a reasoning substrate, memory, a context constructor, a skill router, an orchestration loop and a governance layer
- Context governance
- is the first bottleneck: the problem is not how many tokens a model can hold but whether the right ones are assembled each turn