Preface
This book exists because in late April 2026 the CTO of a 20-person hardware company asked one question that has no off-the-shelf answer:
We have a working prototype agent. It was built by a non-developer. We do not yet trust it in production. What is the minimum viable professional stack we should evolve it onto, and what is that decision actually a decision about?
The question masquerades as a tooling shootout. It is not. It is a question about which architectural axes are independent, which are coupled, where the industry’s vendor-selection energy is concentrated today, where the durable substrate will be in 2028, and how a CTO with a 20-person team and a sales-agent-shaped problem can pick a 2026 answer that does not look foolish in 2027.
This book treats the question seriously. It starts from the conceptual frame, walks the component stack one axis at a time, catalogues every credible vendor in each category with pricing, offers decision frameworks, then issues a Hestiia-specific recommendation with the migration sequence. The bibliography — twenty parallel research subagents plus a reviewer pass — is in the appendix.
The pricing claims are dated. Treat any number more than six months old as stale; the agent-tooling market reprices itself two to three times a year, and category leaders are acquired or pivot on a roughly annual cadence.