When code is a commodity, what actually matters.
When code is a commodity, the bottleneck keeps migrating outward. Prompts → contexts → harnesses → meshes → organizations. Here’s a read on where the field is and where it’s heading — with sources for each trend.
Code w/ Claude · London · 20 May 2026 · Jacob Langvad Nilsson
Watch talks from the conference.
Anthropic has published recordings from Code w/ Claude · London (19–20 May 2026). Browse the full programme on claude.com — keynotes, Claude Code sessions, and the extended track. The notes and references on this page are the companion either way.
Ten things that already shipped.
Practices and primitives that crossed the line from experimentation to default this past year — some in weeks, some in months. Sources for each are listed in the references section.
Now 01
Spec-driven development
The plan is the product. GitHub Spec Kit just passed 90k stars. OpenSpec, GSD, and Speclinear are converging on the same idea.
Now 02
Claude wikis and skills as portable units of expertise
CLAUDE.md, SKILL.md, agent kits, skills marketplaces. Knowledge that used to live in someone's head now travels with the repo.
Now 03
Context engineering
Retrieval, memory, compaction, tool descriptions. Now standard practice — not an afterthought.
Now 04
MCP everywhere
97M monthly SDK downloads, 10K+ public servers. The protocol won.
Now 05
Computer use and browser agents
Claude's OSWorld score went from under 15% to 72.5% in 18 months.
Now 06
Multi-agent orchestration
LangGraph, CrewAI, and Microsoft Agent Framework. From solo agents to coordinated flows.
Now 07
Harness engineering
Hashimoto's framing (Agent = Model + Harness) went from blog post to industry vocabulary in weeks. By Q3, this is the default way teams talk about production agents.
Now 08
Interactive agent evals
ARC-AGI-3, MASEval, MultiAgentBench. Static reasoning tests are losing relevance. The shift is toward measuring multi-step recovery in live environments.
Now 09
Agent identity and security as a procurement gate
Zero-Trust Agent Identity moves from think piece to RFP requirement.
Now 10
Small language models in real products
Phi-4, Gemma 4, Qwen running locally. Not instead of the big models, alongside them. Hybrid wins.
Five bets for the next two quarters.
Where the field looks like it’s heading next — architecture patterns and platform categories with strong enough early signals to bet on.
Next 01
Agentic mesh as an architecture pattern
Service mesh for agents. MCP, policy-as-code, shared memory, semantic discovery, and observable agent fleets.
Next 02
Memory as a platform category
Mem0, Honcho, OpenViking, MemPalace, ByteRover. Memory isn't a feature of an agent. It's its own layer with its own vendors.
Next 03
Continual learning
Agents that update their own skills and tools, not their weights. Early signals: OpenClaw's SOUL.md and the evolving skill patterns in Claude Code.
Next 04
World models bleed into non-robotics products
Genie 3, Marble, LeCun's new lab. Causal simulation enters design, planning, and forecasting tools.
Next 05
Governance as architecture
Compliance stops being a legal review and becomes a constraint that shapes the harness.
The pattern underneath all of it.
Prompts to contexts. Contexts to harnesses. Harnesses to meshes. Meshes to the organizations that build and govern them.
Each era subsumes the one before it. You don’t throw the earlier work away — you embed it.
As the technical layers commoditize, judgment moves up the stack. What to build. Who to build it for. How to govern it once it’s running.
That part isn’t getting commoditized any time soon.
Stay in touch.
Questions, pushback, or want to compare notes? Connect on LinkedIn.
Jacob Langvad Nilsson
Co-founder, Applied Futures
Claude Community Ambassador
AI & Digital Project Lead at Mediq and co-founder of Applied Futures. Hosts the Copenhagen Claude Coders Community (CCC) and writes about agentic engineering.
Connect on LinkedIn →Sources for each trend.
One link per trend, grouped by horizon. Pulled from the LinkedIn comment that accompanied this talk — pick whatever caught your ear.
Where we are now
Next 3 months
Get the next meetup in your inbox
Double opt-in: after signup, we’ll email a confirmation link. No ads.