Vendor marketing either understates the cost of building agents or overstates it by modeling a hypothetical enterprise. The real cost of a five-agent portfolio at mid-market scale sits somewhere in the middle, and the gap between the two is where most budgeting mistakes happen. Here's the honest version.

Claude Skills and Managed Agents shipped with less fanfare than a model release, but together they've changed the PM job more than any tooling shift of the last decade. The artifact of product thinking used to be a PRD that engineering translated. Now it's often a skill file that executes directly.