Environments & Evals Are the Currency of Agent Improvement, Says AI Engineer
BraceSproul · x · 2026-08-13
At the AI Engineer World Fair, a talk on continually improving agents sparked deep discussion. The author shared several core insights:
- Evals as Currency: Agents literally follow behaviors encoded in Evals. The best way to create good evals is mining production data at scale. Therefore, every Continual Learning company will eventually become an Observability & Eval company (and vice versa).
- Model-Harness-Task Fit: There is no universal model or universal harness. You can always build a better agent system by optimizing this specific triad.
- Owning Your Intelligence: Recommends a "Harness Eng - PostTrain - Harness Eng" sandwich approach combined with open-source models to own your AI capabilities.
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