The Big Y #304
Agents that reason
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There have been mixed signals on the effectiveness of just shoving LLMs into organizations and expecting to get value for users beyond coding assistance or basic chatbot usage. A group of researchers ran an extensive survey and found that, at a high level, LLMs need to be more than an answering service and extend into āagentic reasoningā, which is where we are headed in 2026.
The study discusses an expanding agent framework that starts at a simple single-agent layer, then moves to agents self-improving with feedback, and ultimately ends with a system where multiple agents collaborate. If you map this instead to the workforce, you move from a junior employee who is great at a single task and with direction gets that done. Then you move to the senior level, where they are able to learn from their mistakes and develop ābest practicesā over time. And then lastly, the multi-agent systems are reminiscent of an entire organization working together to launch a product.
At the moment I think we are comfortably past the first layer and working on tackling the second one. We are already seeing this in action especially within coding teams, where AI is easily playing the role of a productive junior developer and in some cases is also now stepping into the role of the senior developer. As organizations mature their usage of AI I think weāll rapidly have a broad range of office tasks move into the second layer, which will then set the stage for a jump up to the third, multi-agent system orchestration.
Agents that begin to reason will be able to work across roles and systems to essentially fill the roles of several teams. I am not sure weāve adequately begun to discuss the true impacts to human jobs that will have.
The Tidbit: AI does not exist within a bubble of its own. As it has grown in capabilities, it has also grown in the number of areas of our lives that it touches. Iāve only been at Anthropic for a few months but the events of the past week have made me proud to work at a company that stands up for its values.
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