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March 26, 2026
We mapped the background agent stack. Here's what surprised us.
We mapped the background agent stack
103 tools across 11 layers, from the reasoning engine to governance
When we launched background-agents.com, the response caught us off guard. We shared the scale of agent adoption at Stripe, Ramp, and Spotify, and it exposed a bit of disconnect. Popular opinion still treats coding agents as fancy autocomplete. Meanwhile, these companies are running autonomous fleets that ship thousands of changes a week.
The follow-up question was some version of: "I want to do that, where do I even start?"
Not every company has the infrastructure of Stripe. Fortunately, the ecosystem has evolved where there are plenty of vendors to hit the same level of agentic sophistication. (Full write-up here.)
Three things that stood out:
Sandboxes are not dev environments.
There's also a lot of category confusion, most notably with sandboxes. Sandboxes started as code execution for ChatGPT and Claude. Now they're being repurposed for agents. We expect more granular terms to emerge to meet the growing need for different sandbox types.
Agents are well understood, orchestration is not.
Most teams are coordinating agents through GitHub webhooks and git events. The real challenge now, is not with the harnesses themselves, but with the orchestration of large-scale fleets of agents. Agent offerings from Cursor and Ona are expanding to include workflow and orchestration.
Agent security is an unsolved challenge.
Tools like Keycard are emerging to tackle the challenges of agent identity. Solving this would go a long way to unlocking economically productive use cases.
The decisions behind the map
Will and I recorded a quick 15m walkthrough of how we built the landscape, the category decisions we made, and the gaps that surprised us most.
Background Agents Summit recordings
Building the landscape made one thing obvious: everyone is wrestling with the same problems. Security, orchestration, identity, verification. The tooling is early and the patterns are still forming.
We brought the people building this infrastructure into the same room to share what's working and figure out what comes next. Every session is now available to watch on demand.
If we missed a tool, let us know (we'd love to spotlight it). If we miscategorized your company's tool, we apologize in advance and would like to remind you that this is free.
Talk soon,
Lou
Field CTO, Ona
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