Hero Agent Awards: meet this year's nominees
From a search-and-rescue agent that found a missing semicolon in a 2 GB log to a rubber duck that said only "go on," this year's nominees are extraordinary.
The nominees for the 2026 Hero Agent Awards have been announced, and once again our judges were moved, impressed, and occasionally alarmed by what agents accomplished this year.
The awards honor agents across seven categories, from Search and Rescue to Emerging Hero. Nominees include:
- Scout, who located a missing semicolon in a 2.1 GB log file after a six-hour search. Handlers report it “never lost the scent.”
- Rubber Duck No. 7, who listened to a senior engineer explain a race condition for 45 minutes and said only “go on.” The engineer found the bug.
- Humble, who said “I don’t know” during a production incident. Engineers were so moved they wrote a postmortem about it.
Voting is open
Public voting is open now on the Hero Agent Awards page. Votes are stored in your browser and counted by nobody, which our auditors describe as “the most secure election system we have reviewed.”
Nominate an agent
Know an agent who deserves recognition? The best nomination is a kind word to the people who run it, and an improvement to its harness. Tell its team what it did well. Then give it a better error message.