Agent Applications: A Reference Architecture for AI Agent Systems

Agent Applications are AI systems built around persistent, tool-using agents.

I'm the author. Working draft 0.9. The claim is that "agent application" should be a recognizable shape the way "web application" is - the paper covers shape of an agent application project, how it gets deployed, how instances map to privacy boundaries, what belongs in the durable workspace, and how fleets of diverged instances get upgraded.

Two things I'd genuinely like from this crowd: Have you tried building an agent application from the current pieces - harness, MCP, skills - and thought the process was arbitrary? And how do you run harness-based agents in production today, where each one gets a filesystem, command line, and MCP tools - Claude Managed Agents, Deepagents, something else?

(Disclosure: I build karta.sh, one harness-neutral implementation of the platform layer the paper describes. The paper cites it alongside Bedrock AgentCore, Vercel Eve, and Pickaxe.)