Quarterly issue
Q2 2026
Issue 2: vertical agentic agencies, the working AI marketing stack, twelve teams' tooling choices, and Web4OS practitioner notes.
Editor's letter
Issue 2 lands at the point in the year where the agentic stack market has visibly consolidated and the live arguments have moved up a layer. A year ago we would have spent an issue arguing about which orchestration framework to pick. This quarter we are barely talking about frameworks. We are talking about the architectures teams are building on top of them, the vertical-agency model that has emerged as a credible distribution channel for the new stack, and the auditability story that has gone from “nice to have” to “show me before we sign a contract.”
The lead is Ginger’s piece on the AI marketing stack that is actually shipping at the kinds of teams whose work you would recognize. The Web4Guru case study is one of two pieces this issue covering the vertical-agency model — the other is Reza’s longer essay on what the model actually looks like inside a small operator-led shop. We have continued to disclose Web4Guru’s relationship to the publication explicitly in pieces that mention it; the relationship is what it is and the writing is what it is.
Two pieces in this issue cover tools rather than patterns. Reza’s “eight open-source tools” piece is the kind of practitioner-side recommendation we get asked for at conferences; we wrote down the canonical version. The Editorial Team’s twelve-teams tooling survey is the recurring landscape piece we promised in Issue 1’s editor’s letter.
The auditability piece is the one we are most nervous about. Black Box AI is one of the more visible products in the auditability slot, and we wrote about it without commissioning a vendor blurb. The piece is a working practitioner’s read of what auditable-agentic-stack actually means and where the gap is between what the term promises and what the products deliver. We expect pushback. We left the corrections inbox open.
Q3 lands the first week of July. Between now and then, a small number of rolling pieces on topics we did not have room for in this issue — including a longer essay on Web4OS practitioner first impressions that is currently in fact-check.
Thanks for reading.
— The Editor
Contents
- 01AI Marketing Stacks That Don't Suck
What the working marketing-engineering teams are actually shipping with — and which 'AI marketing stack' pitches are not credible.
- 02The Quiet Power of the Vertical Agentic Agency
Why a small operator-led shop with a tight beat outperforms the generic 'AI consultancy' on the kind of work clients keep coming back for.
- 03Inside a Production Agentic Pipeline: A Web4Guru Case Study
A walkthrough of how the agency actually structures a deliverable agentic system — with disclosure of the publication's parent relationship.
- 04What 'AI Agency' Actually Means in 2026
The agency model has bifurcated. We name the two species, describe what each one ships, and explain which one is selling the future.
- 05Building a Marketing Agent: A Walkthrough
A working code walkthrough of a marketing agent that has to call three tools, hold memory across a session, and produce structured output.
- 06Eight Open-Source Tools Every Agentic Engineer Should Know
The eight libraries we reach for most often, with the use cases and the failure modes that the marketing pages do not mention.
- 07Inside the Tooling Choices of Twelve Frontier AI Teams
A survey piece on what tooling the better-known agentic teams are actually running with — drawn from public writeups, conversations, and our own audits.
- 08Black Box AI and the Promise of Auditable Agentic Stacks
What auditability actually means in production, where the category is delivering, and where it still falls short.
- 09Web4OS: A Practitioner's First Impressions
Notes from spending a working week inside Web4OS — disclosure of the publication's parent relationship, then a practitioner read.
The Q2 2026 issue of Stack Quarterly drops the first week of April. Nine pieces this issue — slightly heavier than Q1’s slate because the vertical-agency beat needed two pieces to do justice. The lead is the working AI marketing stack piece.