Agentic Stack

The “agentic stack” beat is Stack Quarterly’s spine. It is the topic the publication exists for: what working engineers are actually putting in production to ship agentic systems, why they picked it, and what they would change. Coverage on this beat is practitioner-first, qualitative when the numbers do not exist, and skeptical of any pitch that sells velocity without explaining maintenance.

The beat covers the runtime (which models, where, at what cost), the orchestration layer (CEO/specialists patterns, graph-of-calls, state-machine orchestration), the tools-and-protocols slot (MCP, A2A, tool-use specs), the memory layer, and the human-facing surface. Where two pieces in this beat appear to disagree about a recommendation, it is usually because they were written from different vantage points — Reza tends to write from inside the codebase, Ginger tends to write from inside the team adopting the codebase, and the Editorial Team byline tends to write the landscape-level summary that smooths over the disagreements at the cost of some specificity.

We do not cover model-research papers under this beat; that work is better covered by other publications. We do cover the implementation-side reading of a paper when it materially changes what teams are shipping.

Adjacent beats: MCP, tooling, orchestration, agency model.