The Agent Stack Behind Reliable Agentic Systems

Agents fail in production for reasons that rarely show up in a demo: lost context, duplicated work, runs that die halfway and start over. The model isn't the problem. The harness is. The agent harness is the engineering layer wrapped around the model: it plans, fans work out, verifies results, checkpoints progress, and decides what enters the context window. Reliability lives in this layer, and every one of those capabilities resolves to a memory operation. This session is a working tour of the harness's memory surfaces, the places where memory engineering decides whether an agentic application can be trusted with real work. What we'll cover: The state of agentic applications in 2026: autonomous systems that don't just run automations, they build them, and the arrival of first-party harnesses like dynamic workflows in Claude Code Surface one, injection: getting memory into a live agent with Anthropic's mid-conversation system messages, delivering operator-level priority with zero cache invalidation Surface two, coordination: rebuilding the dynamic-workflows pattern as a lightweight custom harness where task claims, findings, and checkpoints live in shared agent memory Surface three, persistence and recall: shared state and vector search in Oracle AI Database, keeping parallel agents coherent and interrupted runs resumable The stack we build on: PALO (Python, Anthropic, LangChain, and Oracle) You'll leave with a reference architecture, the code to run it, and a checklist of the memory surfaces your own harness needs to cover before you call it reliable. Resources: Workshop: https://github.com/oracle-devrel/orac... https://github.com/oracle-devrel/orac... Oracle AI Developer Hub on GitHub: https://github.com/oracle-devrel/orac... Oracle AI Agent Memory Python Package: https://pypi.org/project/oracleagentm... More information on the package: https://www.oracle.com/database/ai-ag... DeepLearning.AI course: https://www.deeplearning.ai/short-cou... Upcoming events: https://www.oracle.com/developer/events