alt Hacker NewsPersonally, I find it fascinating to watch how, whenever a new technology appears, people start competing to define and own its standards.
Manus rebuilt its harness five times in six months. The model stayed the same, but the architecture changed five times.
LangChain re-architected Deep Research four times in one year.
Anthropic also ripped out Claude Code’s agent harness whenever the model improved.
Ever since Mitchell Hashimoto mentioned the harness in February, people have been trying to claim that concept. Eventually, someone will probably sell a book called Harness Engineering. I will buy it, of course. Then I will write a blog post about it that nobody reads, with a link that will be buried under ShowDead as soon as I submit it to HN.
And by that point, IT companies will start asking:
“You’re a new grad, right? You know harness engineering, don’t you?”
Replies
Just wait 6 months for something new to come up and everyone will forget about harnesses.
> Ever since Mitchell Hashimoto mentioned the harness in February
What. The idea is as old as anyone can remember, and wrt. LLMs, it was known to be important since at least as early as ChatGPT being first released.
Author here.
In my opinion, the main driver here is how fast models have evolved in the past 12 months. It makes the architecture of everything around them obsolete, very fast.
We went from using models as a building block, wrapping them in heavy workflow code, to now models being smart enough to drive their own workflows and planning.