Over the last couple years, I've seen the greatest improvements in my agentic coding not from new models or updated tools provided by companies like Anthropic or Cursor, but from direct integrations with and improvements to my own stack: the deterministic scripts and libraries that harness these agents for the specific technologies and products I work on.

This kind of stack deserves its own name: an “agentic software stack”, which is an opinionated stack that includes non-agentic tooling which guides both agents and engineers. In order for models to run for a long time with less monitoring and good results, a system with guardrails, guidance, norms, and transparency is essential.