← all paths
04
Use a managed service
Someone else runs the harness. You configure via API.
The path to watch most closely in 2026. Session persistence, the execution environment, retry logic — these are rarely your competitive advantage. A managed service wires them so you can spend engineering time on what makes your agent actually better.
builds
The vendor
runs
The vendor
decides
Shared
When this fits
- Most teams. Running the infrastructure is not proportional to the value it creates for you.
- You want to ship fast and let the operational layer be someone else’s problem.
- Your edge is the use case, not the harness.
What it demands
Careful evaluation before you commit. Managed does not mean hands-off on architecture, and services are not equivalent.
Learn this first
- 01What a managed agent is vs a plain inference API
- 02Primitive coverage: does it wire what you need?
- 03Observability access and the ejection path
- 04Where the agent actually executes