Q2 2026

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. Reza’s longer essay covers what the vertical-agency model actually looks like inside a small operator-led shop.

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.

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.

Thanks for reading.

— The Editor