The real story isn't AI agents—it's whether they can actually stay coherent long enough to matter. AutoDesign and OmniScientist papers promise multi-step reasoning and cross-domain problem solving, but QuoteBench's finding that matched scores hide catastrophic failures in real deployment is the canary: we're shipping systems that look good in benchmarks and fall apart on edge cases. **The infrastructure layer (llama.cpp, Ollama, LangChain iterations) is quietly winning because it solves the *operational* problem, not the architectural one—Databricks' $5B raise validates that enterprises care more about reliable serving and observability than frontier model complexity. Skip the omni-modal hype, watch the defensive testing and tooling layers instead; that's where actual AI reliability gets built.**