Expect to rebuild, and watch for over-engineering

Perhaps the most freeing lesson is that constant change is normal. Manus was rewritten five times in roughly six months. LangChain re-architected its Open Deep Research project four times. This is not a sign of failure; it is the natural consequence of building on top of models that keep getting stronger.

The article gives a sharp diagnostic: if your harness is getting more complex while the models are getting better, you are probably over-engineering. The biggest performance gains the Manus team saw in their last six months did not come from adding complex RAG pipelines or fancy routing. They came from removing things. They removed complex tool definitions in favor of general shell execution. They removed "management agents" in favor of simple structured handoffs.