A harness is everything between a raw AI model and useful work.
The model is the jet engine, and the harness is the cockpit: everything between raw thrust and a safe landing.
I fly planes. You can buy the same turbofan Airbus puts in an A320, but that won't fly 180 people to LA.
The engine is a commodity, but the cockpit is how you harness thrust into a destination.
The failure patterns and recovery logic we encode into harnesses for our clients won't show up in an open-source repo, because that's judgment earned from real deliveries, not documentation.
The argument that smarter models make harnesses obsolete is a bad take.
A more powerful engine needs better avionics, not fewer, and you'll hit orchestration problems only your harness can solve as labs ship smarter models.
The harness is where your alpha compounds.
There is no alpha in building your own agent harness.
The best techniques will get discovered, copied, and eventually incorporated into open-source harnesses like Pi.
A few months after that happens, these techniques will be made obsolete entirely as labs release smarter models + model providers integrate upwards (pulling more of the harness behind the model API endpoint).
Am I wrong? Please let me know 🧐