The harness isn't dying — it's getting leaner
harness-engineering · field notes Why half of harness engineering is doomed (and we should celebrate it), while the other half becomes the most important thing you'll do. There's a fashionable obituary making the rounds in AI engine rooms. It goes like this: as models get smarter, the harness — all that plumbing we build around an LLM to make it capable of doing something useful — becomes redundant. Get out of the way, hand the model the tools, and let it work. The engineer stops drafting syntax and moves to orchestrating . Each new model version lets you delete a little more scaffolding. The trajectory, they say, points to zero. It's a seductive idea. And, like many seductive ideas, it's half true. The problem is that it crams two very different things into a single word. Let's pull them apart, because they have opposite fates. The accusation: the harness is dead weight Let's do the argument justice before we take it apart, becau...