Overview
HumanLayer is an organization that published the “12-factor agents” principles, a set of guidelines for building production AI agents. They also coined the term “context engineering” (through Dex at HumanLayer) to describe the practice of crafting the full information environment an agent operates in.
Key Facts
- Published “12-factor agents” principles (GitHub: humanlayer/12-factor-agents)
- Their agent definition converges with Anthropic’s: observe → think → act → update state → repeat
- Coined “context engineering” (Dex at HumanLayer)
- Research indicates most companies building production agents end up rolling their own implementation rather than using frameworks
- The 12-factor principles emphasize simplicity, transparency, and first-principles design
Relationships
- “published” agent-loop — Their 12-factor agents define the agent loop pattern
- “coined” context-engineering — Dex at HumanLayer coined the term
- “influenced” intent-classification — Their principles inform intent-based agent design
- “published” ingest — Their agent principles inform the ingest pipeline design
Implications
This matters because HumanLayer provides one of the two major reference architectures (alongside Anthropic’s) for agent design. Their convergence on the simple loop pattern strengthens the case that this is the correct abstraction level for agents.