Your agent architecture has a half-life of 6 months — Dan Farrelly, CTO, Inngest
Agent architectures decay in 6 months; design for layer-based durability to survive AI churn.
“if you've been building agents for more than 6 months, you've likely rewritten something, maybe more than once.”
Inngest CTO Dan Farrelly argues that rapid AI ecosystem evolution (new models, frameworks, tool-calling standards) gives agent architectures an effective half-life of 6 months. He proposes a three-layer mental model — execution (flow/state/retries), context (models/prompts/tools/memory), and compute (sandboxes/browsers) — where isolating the volatile context layer protects the rest of the system. The framework is a practical guide for teams to design intentionally rather than let architecture 'evolve' into technical debt.