Latent.Space published a wrap-up of the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026, held in late June, identifying five trends in AI engineering. The report describes a shift from building agents to building the surrounding "harness" — workflows, context, permissions, evaluation and persistent state — citing Lilian Weng's July 4, 2026 essay "Harness Engineering for Self-Improvement" against her 2023 agent anatomy post. "Loop engineering" emerged as the event's dominant term, with speakers including OpenClaw's Peter Steinberger, HumanLayer's Dex Horthy and Ralph Loop creator Geoffrey Huntley debating human oversight in outer loops. Other trends: enterprise adoption via forward deployed engineers at Sierra, Cursor and Warp (whose "software factory" platform is called Oz); coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor and Warp displacing IDEs, plus Vercel's eve agent framework; and platforms converging on Anthropic-style "agent skills".