Software Planet Group

The pace of change in agentic AI is unlike anything we've seen since the early days of Agile. Six months ago, "harness" was a niche term; today it's how the most effective engineering teams run AI agents in production — and at a recent hackathon, 19 of the top 20 teams had built their solutions on one. If you blinked, you may well have missed the shift.

And that's the problem. For many engineering leaders, the landscape has moved so quickly — from prompt engineering to context engineering to harness building in barely two years — that it's genuinely hard to tell where the industry is heading, and which of today's approaches will still matter next quarter.

Our latest article is an attempt to bring some clarity. We trace how agents used in software development have conceptually evolved: from simple chat models, through the elaborate scaffolding era of LangChain and LangGraph, to the surprising simplification that produced modern harnesses like Claude Code and Hermes. We explain why skills — not bigger models or longer context windows — are the evolutionary point the industry has just reached, what makes them fundamentally different from the MCP-style tooling of a year ago, and where the road leads from here (hint: it involves agents that maintain and improve their own capabilities).

If you're deciding how AI agents should fit into your delivery process — or simply want to understand what your engineers mean when they say "harness" — this one's for you.

https://softwareplanetgroup.co.uk/ai-agent-skills-new-memory/

Reducing SaaS Churn Through Better Product Design

At Software Planet Group, we specialise in designing and developing SaaS products for startups, scale-ups, and established businesses. Over the years, we have seen that reducing churn is rarely about adding more marketing campaigns or aggressive retention tactics. More often, it comes down to thoughtful product design that aligns with the way customers actually use software.

In our latest article, we explore practical approaches that help SaaS companies retain customers without creating frustration or damaging user trust. From subscription pause options and flexible billing models to better lifecycle design, these strategies can significantly improve long-term retention while strengthening customer relationships.

If you are building or scaling a SaaS platform, these are product decisions worth considering.

Read the full article:

https://softwareplanetgroup.co.uk/reducing-saas-churn-through-better-product-design/

It feels like the AI race is entering a very different phase.

One of the more unexpected developments recently: Musk is reportedly allocating capacity from his 1GW Colossus data centre to Anthropic. And that looks rather significant.

Not long ago, Colossus was being positioned as infrastructure built primarily for Grok and xAI. At the same time, Musk had repeatedly criticised Anthropic publicly, often dismissing the company and its approach altogether.

But the market is moving fast.

Anthropic is seeing explosive demand for Claude, and the company clearly needs additional compute capacity to keep up. Ironically, part of that demand may now be supported by infrastructure originally intended to strengthen a direct competitor.

At the same time, Grok appears to be losing momentum.

A good example is Vending Bench - a benchmark focused on long-horizon agentic capabilities. Around the launch of Grok 4, the model scored roughly 4.6k, while Claude 4 was closer to 2k.

Today, Opus 4.7 reportedly exceeds 10k, while Grok’s progress appears far more limited.

And this may be the most important point.

AI development is starting to compound on itself. Leading labs openly discuss how their own models already assist with coding, research, evaluation pipelines and even parts of model development itself.

In other words, stronger models increasingly help build even stronger models.

Which means that once a company starts falling behind, catching up becomes exponentially harder because the leaders are accelerating at the same time.

Against that backdrop, the departure of senior engineers from xAI and the relatively quiet Grok 4.2 release without strong benchmark positioning begin to look more meaningful.

Does this mean xAI is out of the race? Probably too early to say that. Musk has repeatedly shown an ability to make unexpected moves and recover difficult situations.

But allowing a direct competitor access to your flagship infrastructure does look like a strong signal of just how intense the competition in AI has become.

And right now, Anthropic increasingly looks like one of the biggest beneficiaries of this phase of the market.

Curious to hear other views - can xAI realistically close the gap over the next 12-18 months?

AI is once again reshaping how we think about product design and development.

Two new tools from major players are starting to influence not only how interfaces are created, but also how teams approach UX decisions, prototyping, and even collaboration between designers and engineers. At first glance, both solutions look impressive - but the real story sits beneath the surface.

There are subtle, yet critical differences in how they operate, what problems they actually solve, and where their limitations begin. Some of the bold claims don’t fully hold up in practice, while other capabilities are more impactful than they initially appear.

We took a closer look to separate genuine innovation from well-packaged marketing, and to understand what this means for developers, product teams, and businesses making decisions today.

Full breakdown in the article.

https://softwareplanetgroup.co.uk/claude-design-vs-google-stitch/