Sources: Background Agents Summit session pages and the YouTube talks (6-7 May 2026). Definition from background-agents.com. I used Ona’s summit recap and llms-full.txt as indexes. Where a talk, a session page, and other Ona pages disagree, I leave the disagreement in.
I have been treating coding agents as a laptop problem: more terminals, more worktrees, more parallel sessions. That is useful. It is also the wrong unit of scale.
The Background Agents Summit put a sharper name on the next layer. Thirteen talks, recorded 6-7 May 2026, from Stripe, Uber, Cloudflare, Harvey, Open Inspect, Genentech, incident.io, Monzo, AWS, Tessl, Ona, Nono, and software-factory.dev. The claim is not that agents write more code. The claim is that org cycle time stays flat until the work leaves the laptop.
I am reading this as a field review. The useful part is how independently these teams landed on the same runtime.