Agent Orchestration

MAServeBench held the generated work fixed and changed only the order in which agents were allowed to run. Median deadline attainment went from 100% to 4%. October's measurements put the cost of a swarm at the deadline, and the token meter is the smaller bill.

Anthropic's 2026 Agentic Coding Trends Report says the developer's job is shifting from writing code to orchestrating the agents that do. The number that matters is the gap between the 60% of work that uses AI and the 0-20% that can be fully delegated.

The autonomy-versus-control debate had a real academic origin and a real outcome. AutoGen, the autonomy pole, is in maintenance mode. Control won, but the control plane that won is the type system, not the graph.

Raven constructs and revises its own agent harness, and OpenAI's Agents API turns the harness into a managed service. Two moves automating the same layer away from developers, and why the audit problem is the part that matters.

The framework debate consolidated into a spectrum. The next argument is over orchestration topology: every multi-agent design reduces to who holds state and control, and a February 2026 research cluster is formalizing that choice as an optimization problem rather than a brand pick.

The agent-framework market consolidated into four orchestration patterns, but those patterns leak into each other by the vendors' own docs. They are primitives on a spectrum from deterministic to autonomous, and the decision is which primitive you need, not which framework.