Skip to content
phaiAI.tech
Research & credits

We would rather be measured against published work than against our own marketing.

Everything on this site rests on work done by other people. The frameworks, standards and research below are theirs; what we contribute is implementation, domain adaptation and the judgement about which of it applies to a given organisation. Where we borrow a model, we name the author.

22 sources6 practice areas

On attribution

PhaiAI is an independent practice. We are not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Weave Intelligence, asdlc.io, the OWASP GenAI Security Project, Microsoft, Cognee, Supermemory or Vectorize. Where our diagrams express a model from one of these sources, the source is named in the figure caption or the section note. Where we disagree with a source, we say that too.
01 · 3 sources

The lifecycle: ASDLC

The framing we use for how work moves when agents are actors rather than tools. We did not invent it, and we say so.

  • What is the Agentic Software Development Lifecycle (ASDLC)?

    Kaspar von Grünberg · Weave Intelligence, 2026

    Research article

    The source of the paths model, the three path types, the hybrid loop, and the reading of the human's role shifting from executor to validator to orchestrator to constraint-setter.

    https://weaveintelligence.io/blog/what-is-the-agentic-software-development-lifecycle-asdlc ↗

  • The four levels of agentic software development in the enterprise

    Weave Intelligence, 2026

    White paper

    The research foundation behind the four-level maturity model we use to assess where a client's lifecycle actually sits before proposing anything.

    https://weaveintelligence.io/research ↗

  • ASDLC knowledge base — getting started

    Ville Takanen and contributors · asdlc.io, 2026

    Guide

    The Context / Agents / Gates layering, spec-as-source-code, AGENTS.md as version-controlled context, micro-commits, and the three-tier gate hierarchy. Also available as an MCP server and a downloadable skill.

    https://asdlc.io/getting-started/ ↗

02 · 4 sources

The platform: IDP → AEP

Why the agent is not the unit of value, and why throughput is a property of the platform rather than the model.

  • From IDP to AEP: Why platform engineers now build Agentic Engineering Platforms

    Kaspar von Grünberg · Weave Intelligence, 2026

    Research article

    The argument that the deterministic platform becomes the harness that makes probabilistic agents safe, and that an AEP without clean IDP foundations is not worth attempting.

    https://weaveintelligence.io/blog/from-idp-to-aep ↗

  • What is an Agentic Engineering Platform?

    Kaspar von Grünberg · Weave Intelligence, 2026

    Research article

    The three-layer reference shape — tooling, path specifications, agent infrastructure — including the harness, governance and models planes, and the observation that agent infrastructure is the layer that does not change per domain.

    https://weaveintelligence.io/blog/what-is-an-agentic-engineering-platform ↗

  • Stop wasting tokens. Build a platform

    Kaspar von Grünberg · Weave Intelligence, 2026

    Research article

    The onboarding analogy we borrow constantly: an agent dropped into an environment built for humans behaves exactly like a brilliant hire who was never onboarded.

    https://weaveintelligence.io/blog/stop-wasting-tokens-build-a-platform ↗

  • Domain-driven platform engineering is the future

    Ajay Chankramath, in conversation with Weave Intelligence · Weave Intelligence, 2026

    Interview

    The three pillars we apply to every engagement: domain-aligned boundaries, ubiquitous language in platform APIs, and bounded contexts with anti-corruption layers. Also the source of the platform-domain versus business-domain distinction.

    https://weaveintelligence.io/interviews/domain-driven-platform-engineering-is-the-future-weave-intelligence ↗

03 · 5 sources

Security and governance

The standards our agent development follows. These are not references we read once; they are the checklists our gates encode.

04 · 4 sources

Context and memory

Domain Context Engines are assembled, not invented. These are the systems and the research underneath them.

  • HINDSIGHT: Structured Agent Memory that Retains, Recalls, and Reflects

    Latimer et al. · Vectorize · Virginia Tech, 2025

    White paper

    Typed facts — world, experience, opinion, observation — with temporal entity graphs, evolving confidence, and the retain / recall / reflect operations. Reports 83.6% on LongMemEval with a 20B open model, ahead of full-context GPT-4o.

    https://people.cs.vt.edu/naren/papers/66_Hindsight_Structured_Agent_.pdf ↗

  • Cognee — open-source agent memory platform

    Cognee, 2026

    Tooling

    Knowledge-graph construction as a pipeline over relational, vector and graph stores. Where a domain has decades of documents rather than conversations, this is usually the right substrate.

    https://www.cognee.ai/ ↗

  • Supermemory — managed memory engine

    Supermemory, 2026

    Tooling

    Extraction, graph linking, versioning, expiry and standing profiles behind one API with sub-300ms retrieval. Our default when a client needs a Domain Context Engine running in weeks, not quarters.

    https://supermemory.ai/ ↗

  • LongMemEval and LoCoMo benchmarks

    Wu et al. (2024); Maharana et al. (2024) · Academic, 2024

    Research article

    The long-horizon memory benchmarks we use to justify a memory architecture choice with numbers instead of preference.

    https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.10813 ↗

05 · 2 sources

Packaging and distribution

How an agent stops being a folder on someone's laptop and becomes a governed, installable dependency.

  • APM — Agent Package Manager

    Microsoft, 2026

    Tooling

    A dependency manager for agent context. One apm.yml declares skills, prompts, instructions, plugins and MCP servers; a lockfile pins content hashes; apm-policy.yml is enforced at install time with tighten-only inheritance from enterprise to org to repo.

    https://microsoft.github.io/apm/ ↗

  • Model Context Protocol

    Anthropic and contributors, 2026

    Standard

    How our Domain Context Engines and tool gateways are exposed to any harness without per-vendor integration work.

    https://modelcontextprotocol.io/ ↗

06 · 4 sources

Cost and economics

Where our cost-engineering practice comes from. Token prices collapsed and AI budgets grew anyway; these are the sources that explain why, and what to do about it.

  • AI cost optimization

    Snowflake, 2026

    Guide

    The most complete survey of the underlying research we have found: the roughly ten-to-one prompt-to-output ratio in enterprise workloads, prefill versus decode economics, the measured thousandfold gap between code chat and coding agents, and the compress → cache → route → batch ordering of compatible levers. Our lever stack follows this sequencing.

    https://www.snowflake.com/en/artificial-intelligence/ai-engineering/ai-cost-optimization/ ↗

  • How to respond to the coming AI cost shock

    Stacia Garr · Harvard Business Review, 2026

    Research article

    The argument that vendors absorbing GPU, inference and token costs produced a false sense of budgetary and operational security — and that the words unmetered, complimentary and included were a pricing strategy, not a permanent state. The framing for our 'why now'.

    https://hbr.org/2026/08/how-to-respond-to-the-coming-ai-cost-shock ↗

  • Three proven strategies for optimizing AI costs

    Marcus Oliver and Eric Lam · Google Cloud, 2026

    Research article

    The source of the six-component total cost of ownership model we use, and of the FinOps for generative AI pillars — enablement, cost allocation, model optimisation, pricing model and value reporting — that shape the operate phase of our engagements.

    https://cloud.google.com/transform/three-proven-strategies-for-optimizing-ai-costs ↗

  • The economics of agent optimization: four ways to lower the cost

    Steve Sweetman · Microsoft Azure, 2026

    Research article

    Where we take 'an agent is a loop around a model' and the insistence on cost per successful outcome rather than price per token. Also the observation that prototype defaults silently become production architecture, and the four runtime levers: models and offers, caching, prompt and agent optimisation, and observability with evaluation.

    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/the-economics-of-agent-optimization-four-ways-to-lower-the-cost/ ↗

Standing on shoulders

The older work this all depends on.

Agentic engineering is new. Most of what makes it work is not.

Domain-Driven Design

Eric Evans

Bounded contexts, ubiquitous language and anti-corruption layers — the vocabulary that makes a Domain Context Engine describable at all.

Team Topologies

Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais

How teams should interact. Domain-driven platform engineering answers the adjacent question: what each team's platform interface should look like.

Effective Platform Engineering

Ajay Chankramath et al.

Platform-as-a-product practice, which the AEP inherits wholesale — a platform is owned indefinitely, not delivered and handed over.

Paths, as a concept

Originally coined by Charity Majors

The idea that a platform's job is to make a valuable route to an outcome repeatable. Agents turned out to need paths for exactly the same reasons humans do.

Think we have credited you incorrectly, or read you wrong?

Tell us and we will fix it. If you are one of the authors above and you think our reading of your work is off, we would genuinely rather hear it than be quietly wrong on a website.

research@phaiai.tech