Article
Scaling Managed Agents- Decoupling the Brain From the Hands
anthropic.com
- A running topic on the Engineering Blog is how to build effective agents and design harnesses for long-running work. A common thread across this work is that harnesses encode assumptions about what Claude can’t do on its own. However, those assumptions need to be frequently questioned because they can go stale as models improve.
- As just one example, in prior work we found that Claude Sonnet 4.5 would wrap up tasks prematurely as it sensed its context limit approaching—a behavior sometimes called “context anxiety.” We addressed this by adding context resets to the harness. But when we used the same harness on Claude Opus 4.5, we found that the behavior was gone. The resets had become dead weight.
- Building Managed Agents meant solving an old problem in computing: how to design a system for “programs as yet unthought of.”
- The abstractions outlasted the hardware. The
read()command is agnostic as to whether it’s accessing a disk pack from the 1970s or a modern SSD. The abstractions on top stayed stable while the implementations underneath changed freely.