Harvey

What the Best Agents Share — Mardu Swanepoel, Flinn AI

May 26, 2026 · 10:21

Mardu Swanepoel of Flinn AI identifies four patterns shared by top agents like Cursor, Claude, Manus, and Harvey: focus modes, transparent execution, personalization, and reversibility. Focus modes constrain the action space to improve output quality and align user expectations, as Cursor does with planning and debug modes. Transparent execution shows tool calls and reasoning to build trust and enable early intervention, exemplified by Claude's live task list and Manus's progress tracking. Personalization optimizes speed to understanding through playbooks (Harvey) and memory, so agents follow firm-specific methods. Reversibility bounds downside with rollbacks at line, file, or conversation levels (Cursor) and integration with native undo in Harvey's Word add-in, encouraging users to tackle higher-value tasks.

3 ingredients for building reliable enterprise agents - Harrison Chase, LangChain/LangGraph

Jul 23, 2025 · 20:55

Harrison Chase, CEO of LangChain, argues that reliable enterprise agents depend on three ingredients: high value when right, high probability of success, and low cost when wrong. He says agents succeed by tackling high-value tasks like legal or research, and by doing more work through long-running processes. Reliability improves by blending deterministic workflows with agentic loops, as in LangGraph, and by using observability (LangSmith) to build trust. Cost is lowered by reversible actions (e.g., code diffs) and human-in-the-loop patterns like approvals and time travel. Chase predicts a future of ambient agents—event-triggered, human-supervised background agents—and notes code agents lead because code is verifiable and easily revertible.