The Real Competition in AI Agents Has Moved Down the Stack

Why context engineering, memory, permissions, and recovery now separate production agents from good s. If you spend enough time around agent builders, one pattern becomes impossible to ignore: teams are still obsessing over which model is smartest, while the strongest production systems are quietly winning somewhere else. The real advantage in AI agents is moving below the model layer into context engineering, memory discipline, tool orchestration, evaluation, and bounded autonomy. That shift is subtle enough to miss in s and obvious enough to matter in production.