← All IntelClip / AI AgentsMessages API to Agent SDK to Managed Agents
From Claude for Long-Horizon Tasks — Lance Martin, Anthropic · ≈2:06
Maps the three levels of abstraction available for building agents — roll your own harness, get a harness, or get harness plus managed deployment — and when each is appropriate.
What’s in it
- Maps the three levels of abstraction available for building agents — roll your own harness, get a harness, or get harness plus managed deployment — and when each is appropriate.
Clip transcript
needed longer task horizons. And so we're starting to see that now. And kind of with this shift in capability and time horizon came a shift in the API surfaces. So if you look at the lower left, Messages API came out like 2 years ago. It's basically prompt response. It's great for building harnesses, but it's a very simple API. Again, you're just passing in a message and you get a response out. There's no sense of deployment with that. So you basically take Messages API and you can roll your own harness, you can deploy that harness, and you have an agent. Now over the past year, we saw the rise of, you know, coding agents in particular. So we released Agent SDK. So that's basically a way to programmatically call Claude code. And that's like basically us giving you a harness. But over the past few months, since April, as we've seen longer longer task horizons, we released a new API called Managed Agents, which basically packages both the harness as well as all the managed deployment infrastructure for you. And I'll talk about some of the themes that underpin this new uh surface, Claude Managed Agents, and and some of the themes that kind of extend beyond just Managed Agents broadly to think about this kind of new type of asynchronous agents, uh which can apply of course to Claude and other types of kind of longer running long horizon agents.
Comments
Sign in to comment.
Loading comments…