Handing Off Residue

Not a ToE · Oct 25, 2026 · 37m

Two complaints keep turning up in agent engineering at once. Teams are folding their trees of specialist subagents back into a single loop, because every handoff loses context and adds latency. At the same time, self-improving loops are being hailed as autonomous, no longer needing a human anywhere in them. They sound like opposite quarrels. Both come from one misplaced boundary: the one between the activity that is still going on and the residue it leaves behind.

Much of what the sources found holds. Anthropic's October evaluation of enterprise harnesses and CellCog's experiments on…