--- title: "Practitioner's Corner" canonical: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/20/practitioners-corner" publication: "TinyFish" publisher: "TinyFish" language: "en-US" guide: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/llms.txt" permalink: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/20/practitioners-corner" issue: 20 section: "practitioners-corner" description: "Lessons from the field—what we see building at scale" authors: ["Rina Takahashi","Nora Kaplan"] published: 2026-03-16 updated: 2026-03-12 articles: 9 --- # TinyFish > CURRENT is a journal about AI agents in production, for the engineering and product leaders who have to make them work. Drawing on experience building enterprise web agents, it explains why the demo succeeded and the deployment didn't, and what that means for choosing vendors, briefing the board, and avoiding mistakes others have already made. [Read on the website]() ## Issue 20 — Practitioner's Corner Lessons from the field—what we see building at scale ### Preparation Infrastructure - [The Problem That Takes Twenty-Two Months to Start Solving]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2026-03-11 · Format: Preparation Infrastructure A startup spent twenty-two months building infrastructure before it had a product to sell. At pre-seed, that tempo looks like a mistake. But a study tracking 151 million IDE window activations found something uncomfortable: developers using AI tools were context-switching *more* over time, not less. Seventy-four percent didn't notice the increase. ### The Handoff Problem - [The Handoff Is the Product]() — By [Nora Kaplan]() · Published 2026-03-11 · Format: The Handoff Problem On the benchmarks that matter most to the agent industry, a browser agent that completes 90% of a task scores identically to one that never starts. Both register as zero. The measurement is binary: full completion or nothing. And the best systems currently finish about 62% of their runs. ### Redesigning for Handoff - [A Middleware Engineer on Why the Agent's Best Work Happens at the Handoff]() — Published 2026-03-11 *Practitioner's Corner occasionally conducts hypothetical interviews — conversations with composite characters grounded in publicly documented production patterns. Femi Oduya is not a real person, but the problems he describes are. If you've shipped an agent system past the pilot stage, you've probably met someone like him. If you haven't, you will.* ### Protocol-Level Handoffs - [MCP's New Tasks Primitive Formalizes the Handoff Problem — Then Runs Into It]() — Published 2026-03-11 The 2026 MCP roadmap, published March 9 by Lead Maintainer David Soria Parra, introduces the Tasks primitive (SEP-1686) as an experimental feature giving long-running operations a proper lifecycle: working, completed, failed, cancelled, and input_required, a first-class state for when a task can't finish autonomously. ### Further Reading - **Browser Agent Reliability — Benchmarks, Hype Gaps and What Real Task Performance Looks Like** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-11 A median benchmark score of 7/10 with re-prompting on every task tells you exactly where autonomous completion ends and handoff design becomes load-bearing. - **The Era of Agentic AI Demands a Data Constitution, Not Better Prompts** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-11 Yerrasani's argument lands on a point most agent architectures ignore: bad data upstream doesn't trigger a handoff, it produces confident wrong output thousands of times before anyone notices. - **5 Real Projects Where Agentic AI Failed Badly in 2026, and What Engineers Learned** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-11 The recurring pattern across these failures: weeks of silent data corruption with no handoff surface that would have made correctness observable before the damage compounded. - **MCP and A2A: A Network Engineer's Mental Model for Agentic AI** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-11 Agent Cards function as compressed handoff contracts, formalizing where one agent's responsibility ends and another's begins. The network engineering analogy reveals how much of this problem already has prior art. - **The 2026 MCP Roadmap** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-11 The gaps in the Tasks primitive lifecycle (retry semantics, expiry policies, cancellation handling) are where the protocol quietly admits that handoff infrastructure remains unfinished. ## Other sections in Issue 20 - [Daily Brief]() - [Market Pulse]() - [Foundations]() - [Echoes]() - [Vision]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()