Sam Bhagwat

Every Harness Will Become A Claw — Sam Bhagwat, Mastra

Jul 21, 2026 · 15:36

Sam Bhagwat, founder/CEO of Mastra, argues that every developer harness will inevitably evolve into a 'claw'—an always-on, self-improving agent that takes initiative. He defines the journey from basic LLMs to agents, then to harnesses (durable, planning-capable tools like Claude Code), and finally to claws that add external event listening, heartbeat-driven wakeups, and continual learning via auto-skill generation. Drawing on Steinberger's law (a play on Zawinski's law), Bhagwat predicts a future shakeout where only a handful of claws survive, just as mobile platforms consolidated around a few apps. He urges builders to equip their agents with the full capability stack—durability, planning, parallel subagents, session persistence—to avoid being displaced in the coming consolidation.

Agents vs Workflows: Why Not Both? — Sam Bhagwat, Mastra.ai

Aug 1, 2025 · 15:37

Sam Bhagwat, co-founder of Mastra and author of 'Principles of AI Agents', argues that the debate between agents and workflows is misguided—developers should combine both. He criticizes OpenAI's anti-workflow stance as 'being that guy' and LangChain's graph/node/edge APIs as harmful, advocating for fluent syntax over graph theory. Bhagwat defines agents as turn-based games and workflows as rules-engine dependency chains, noting that nondeterminism makes workflow tracing 10x more important in AI engineering. He demonstrates composition patterns: agents can be steps, workflows can be tools, and nested workflows handle dynamic tool injection. He recommends starting with agent power, then adding workflow control for reliability—e.g., breaking one LLM call into 12 for medical PDFs. Bhagwat concludes that practice trumps theory in this young field.