--- title: "Agentic Development Future and Current Directions - Nov 2026" type: post url: "https://robotpaper.ai/agentic-development-future-and-current-directions-nov-2026/" canonical: "https://robotpaper.ai/agentic-development-future-and-current-directions-nov-2026/" markdown_url: "https://robotpaper.ai/agentic-development-future-and-current-directions-nov-2026.md" published: "2026-11-08T08:49:34.000+00:00" updated: "2026-11-08T08:49:34.000+00:00" tags: ["trends"] author: "Roy Osherove" author_links: ["https://robotpaper.ai", "https://x.com/royosherove", "https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/", "https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7", "https://robotpaper.ai/about-roy.md"] description: "Here are things I'm seeing from across the web - that I think will be big in 3-12 months. Just putting it here so I don't forget. Could be useful for you as well. 1. Formal Software Verification (TLA+ and others, for agent-based work) 2. Agent Experience Design and Testing * (l.a AJX) 3. Single-user and multi-user long-lived agents (like OpenClaw, Kiro Crew) * Security * Privacy * Context isolation 4. Sandboxing for agents (not new but gaining) * Types * Be" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original post)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Agentic Development Future and Current Directions - Nov 2026 Here are things I'm seeing from across the web - that I think will be big in 3-12 months. Just putting it here so I don't forget. Could be useful for you as well. 1. **Formal Software Verification** (TLA+ and others, for agent-based work) 2. **Agent Experience Design and Testing** - (l.a [AJX](https://ajx.dev/)) 3. **Single-user and multi-user long-lived agents** (like OpenClaw, Kiro Crew) - Security - Privacy - Context isolation 4. **Sandboxing for agents (not new but gaining)** - Types - Best and worst practices - State of the art 5. **Factory Engineering** (how to design good software factories; the future of CI/CD in the age of agents) (ie [my factory post](https://robotpaper.ai/anatomy-of-a-personal-factory-of-grok-bots/) but for software) - This covers many smaller fields: 1. Types of agents and their roles (chief of staff, agent per task, temporary vs long-lived agents) 2. Role of testing in factories: which types of tests make sense 3. Environment management in agentic pipelines 4. Company Brain, context engineering, security, privacy 5. Sandboxing 6. Long-lived vs ephemeral agents 6. **Company Brain (not new but gaining)** - Types of brains and contexts - RAG vs graphs - Tools like [RepoSwarm](http://reposwarm.ai/) 7. **Agent Swarms: cross-agent communication and interaction** - Like Grok bots, which can create and talk to other bots easily - Tools like [Kiro Crew](https://kiro.dev/crew/) bots and Grok bots 8. **ProdoTyping** - SDLC for prototyping (Lovable, Base44: many orgs are moving to self-prototyping flows) - Tools like [LowKey](https://github.com/inceptionstack/lowkey) plus an auto-vending control plane 9. **Multi-agent code conflicts** - How do 1000+ agents, with 1000+ commits on the same repo, avoid bottlenecks? - Still unsolved 10. **Decision Models** - Best and worst practices - How to build or train your own decision model 11. **Local Models (not new but gaining)** - Used together with remote models 12. **Harness Engineering (been going on for a while)** - Learning and using harnesses like Pi - How to build your own harness, or extend Pi and others ## Read next - [Graphlin - Jev-Enabled Live Architecture Visualizer](https://robotpaper.ai/graphlin-jev-enabled-live-architecture-visualizer.md) - [The New Bottlenecks After Coding](https://robotpaper.ai/the-new-bottlenecks-after-coding.md) - [Generating Weird & Beautiful Architecture Diagrams with Claude](https://robotpaper.ai/generating-weird-beautiful-architecture-diagrams-with-claude.md) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove** - Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: [https://x.com/royosherove](https://x.com/royosherove) - LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/) ### Contact - Contact form: [https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7](https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7) ### License Content on robotpaper.ai is licensed under [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/): reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original post). More about Roy and his other sites and projects: [https://robotpaper.ai/about-roy.md](https://robotpaper.ai/about-roy.md)