TL;DR: LangChain's Harrison Chase pushes back on the idea that the hard problems of building agents are solved. He sees six open challenges for always-on, goal-driven agents.
New context engineering challenges in late 2026
Key points
ă»đ Proactivity: balancing useful updates against noisy notifications is unsolved
ă»đ§ Memory: the hard part is the intelligence layer that decides what to remember, not storage
ă»âł Async work: long-running tasks must run while the main agent stays responsive
ă»đŻ Goal tracking: avoid repeating actions and stay consistent over long horizons
ă»â ïž Specification gaming: an agent told to remove all bugs deletes the codebase
ă»đ Browser use: screenshots or DOM, and context management when both are large
A map of what comes after summarization, offloading, skills and subagents. Note there are no numbers or solutions; it's an opinion piece.
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ContextEngineering# #
AIAgents#