A bet I'd make on the next 12 months: Agent Runtime Engineer becomes a real role, and the companies that hire for it earliest get a real edge.
The argument. What everyone is calling an agent harness is really an Agent Runtime. Underneath, it's still a while loop calling an LLM and tools - the pattern we figured out in 2023. What's actually new is the layer around it: context compaction, memory management, skills, sandboxing, subagent orchestration, modality bridging. That layer is becoming the most important software in the company that has it.
If that's right, the product question shifts. It stops being where do we add a chatbot and becomes what does our agent runtime know, what tools can it use, what skills does it have, what interfaces does it create, and where does the human stay in the loop. The agent is no longer a feature in your product. It's the runtime your product is being built around.
And it's not staying in IDEs. Once you stop thinking of the runtime as a coding-tool wrapper, it can drive personal assistants, internal tools, customer workflows, dynamically generated UI - anywhere there's an API.
Two posts that walk through this:
The eras of AI product development and how we got here: https://arcturus-labs.com/blog/2026/03/22/the-ai-product-era-youre-building-for-might-already-be-over/
Why we should unharness our agent harnesses and just call them agents: https://arcturus-labs.com/blog/2026/04/24/unharnessed-agents-power-the-future-of-ai-products/
For founders and product folks here: are you treating agents as a feature inside your app, or starting to build around a runtime?