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Patchnotes

DeepSeek's Super-agent and the human bottleneck

Issue 73 min read

DeepSeek proposes agents that supervise other agents, Anthropic ships Claude Duet and hands Agent Skills to the Linux Foundation, plus new open projects and agent tools.

In this issue

DeepSeek wants agents to supervise agents

DeepSeek estimates that a person can track only 3 to 5 agent sessions at once. Past that point, the person is the limit, not the model. Much of this week’s agent news is an attempt to get around that number.

DeepSeek’s own answer is Super-agent, described in a technical write-up. It is an architecture for running many AI tasks without a person supervising each session. The design works like a small team:

  • A Router hands out work to Workers that run in parallel.
  • Agents monitor GitHub discussions, investigate bugs and open pull requests.
  • A Watchdog checks for agents that are stuck or drifting off task.

In simulated tests, the 95th-percentile task time fell from 29.5 to 15.7 minutes. That speed cost many more tokens. The tests also did not measure code quality, so faster does not yet mean better.

The DeepSeek Harness prototype is open source, and so is a separate Super-agent prototype repo. Super-agent itself is still a proposal, not a product.

Claude Duet works while you’re away

Anthropic unveiled Claude Duet, an assistant that keeps working when you are not at your desk. It monitors your connected apps and prepares tasks in the background. It asks before it takes important actions.

Duet takes the other route around the session limit. Instead of many sessions you have to watch, you get one assistant that watches your apps for you.

Duet is a research preview. There is a waitlist for Pro and Max subscribers in the US.

Agent Skills gets a neutral home

Anthropic is donating the Agent Skills standard to the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation. A skill packages instructions and tools so an agent can reuse them for a task.

Until now the format belonged to one company. The donation moves it to a foundation that no single company controls.

Open agent projects

  • AutoSwarm. A project from HKU that connects different AI agents so they share context and work as a team. It picks agents for subtasks, coordinates them and combines the results.
  • Sage-A1.5. An open agent model for long research and engineering tasks. It splits an investigation among several agents, checks its own progress, and combines web research with analysis and software tools.
  • DeepInfer. DeepSeek open-sourced the inference software behind its large-scale services. The first release runs DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, with faster generation and output-control features. A full online service still needs extra components.

Agent tools to try

  • agent-desktop. Like agent-browser, but for your whole computer. It gives any coding agent computer use, and several agents can work in parallel, each with its own cursor.
  • Reverse Engineer Anything. An open-source toolkit that gives your agent reverse-engineering abilities through MCP and a CLI.
  • terminal-mac. A full macOS that runs inside your terminal. Computer use is built in through MCP, a CLI and a skill. Free and open source.
  • Agent37. A low-cost sandbox for agents.
  • Capy. Run a fleet of cloud coding agents inside the apps your team already uses.
  • Grok Bot. AI teammates you can hand real work to.
  • Instinct. A personal assistant that learns what you are working on and what matters to you.
  • Bastion. Closes your router’s backdoors and shows where your traffic goes. It also speeds up your Wi-Fi and lets agents watch your network.
  • Paper. One design space, built on web standards, that connects your teams, agents, code and data. There is a video guide too.

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