Nora is the agent harness that runs my company of 1500+ employees and thousands of agents. Everyday Nora handles about 2k+ Slack requests and 300+ pull requests generation across 300+ team-specific personas. We built it the way most teams build agents today, with a central router delegating to specialist subagents for Jira, Slack, Salesforce, and a half-dozen other domains. Each one carried its own prompt, tools, and LLM call.
Over the past year we deleted almost all of them.
The pattern was the right call for the models we had in 2024, when breadth made them hallucinate tool calls and loop. Then the models got better and the scaffolding we built to compensate became the ceiling. A subagent boundary is a second copy of your prompt layer, identity, quota, model choice, authz surface, and tool namespace, and every copy drifts from the first. This talk show you the wrong answers that drift produced in production, and what we replaced them with, including the one place we put delegation back on purpose.
You can learn about Nora from this blog : https://builders.abnormal.ai/p/nora-our-first-agent-employee
This talk has been presented at AI Coding Summit Berlin, check out the latest edition of this Tech Conference.
