Why labs haven't killed the app layer: Engineers prefer devs over lawyers
herbiebradley · x · 2026-08-31
Herbie Bradley, independent researcher and former UK AI Safety Institute member, discusses why labs haven't killed the application layer.
Key points:
- Culture over capability: App layer success is largely downstream of company culture.
- Engineer bias: Lab engineers prefer building for coders rather than end-users like lawyers.
- Agent swarms: Insights from his new piece, including:
- Why enterprises wanting multiple vendors keeps swarms communicating in plain text.
- Nightly reinforcement learning on internal traces.
- Models as tradable assets.
- Technical issues: The "saxophone problem" with markdown-based memory and how the Hugging Face incident shifted his timelines for continual learning.
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