strands

On October 13, 2026 the Strands Agents team published about 94,000 Harbor trials. On matched Anthropic runs, estimated cost ran from about $0.74 to $1.57 per trial.

Checked 16 Oct 2026: Qwen Decider 2B v1 scores 180 of 231. Gemma 4 12B, released 15 Oct, scores 200 of 231 at a 136 ms H100 median. Jev stays $0.042/MTok, with no matching JevBench row.

OpenAI's 11 February 2026 Codex experiment merged about 1,500 pull requests. AgentCore Harness, GA 17 June 2026, still defaults to 75 iterations and a 3,600-second timeout — the harness sets those bounds, not the model.

On September 21, 2026 the Strands Agents team reported 28% lower token cost across six benchmarks, and 77% less than Claude Code with Fable 5 on Terminal-Bench. That figure is not an AgentCore bill.

For the person who will build your first store agent on AWS — not a Shopify plug-in. One lookup workflow this week; refunds wait for a person. Planning silhouette ~$791/mo at 50K sessions.

Your org chart wants five agents before one lookup works. If you are under ~8 tools and one audience, stop — one agent. The ~$791/mo platform cost floor at 50,000 sessions is one support-shaped mix, not five specialists.

Do not staff all five specialists in week one. An open-ended "handle this order" fans out to every agent. Hop cap 2. The ~$791/mo platform cost floor at 50,000 sessions is one support-shaped mix, not a fleet budget.

Do not pick AgentCore vs Quick. Pick the surface. Agent Skills are official on Harness and Strands, not Chat Agents. August 2026 list price: 500-employee Quick Professional ~$10,250/mo vs ~$791 AgentCore at 50K sessions.

Harness GA Jun 17, 2026 plus Strands 1.0 primitives — and why AWS Context is still Coming soon. Reuse the ~180→95 ms Gateway canary; ship Managed KB today.