We need re-learn what AI agent development tools are in 2026

This article was written by Andrew Green, technical writer and industry analyst. We pay Andrew, but he refuses to write anything else but his own opinion. The big boys entered the market, OpenClaw appropriated the MCP security strategy, and everyone started vibe coding but only if they already knew how to code. It really feels like 2025 was the year of agents, mainly because the industry came to a consensus about how we expect an agent to behave. That and because we found we can bypass context window sizes by spawning sub-agents. When we first wrote the Enterprise AI agent development tools, we focused a lot on the building blocks of writing agents, such as RAG, memory, tools, and evaluations. One year later, all these capabilities appear to have been commoditized to some degree. We now expect most vendors to…