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What Is a Harness?

earendil.com

51–60 of 200 posts

Re: What Is a Harness?

#51
I have a similar mental model to the climbing harness. I think of LLMs as horses and harnesses as the saddle, reins, etc that you put on your horse. You might configure your harness for an individual rider or you might hook together several horses to pull a carriage.

Re: What Is a Harness?

#52

Harnesses are the next frontier. If LLMs are electricity, harnesses are the “electronics.” Right now, it’s like an AC vs DC between Claude and ChatGPT, but once that settles, the harnesses will be the actual value providers. And Pi is the best harness because of the amazing extension system. You can build extensions that turn Pi into a stock trader, software factory, anything. I tried switching to another harness but…

This is a plug, but relevant. I recently added a 'build native tools on the fly' functionality to Dirac ( https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac ) that works like: 1. You can use the '/new-tool' and tell what kind of tool you want (including whether it should be task-scoped, workspace-scoped, or global), the model builds it, the harness runs validation and other tests until the tool is ready 2. The model decides that in…

This type of modification of the harness on the fly to fit the need is the future. The only thing left after that is the mobile front. I think static app store type software as we know it is a thing of the past. You'll only ever need one self modifying app.

Re: What Is a Harness?

#53

Harnesses are the next frontier. If LLMs are electricity, harnesses are the “electronics.” Right now, it’s like an AC vs DC between Claude and ChatGPT, but once that settles, the harnesses will be the actual value providers. And Pi is the best harness because of the amazing extension system. You can build extensions that turn Pi into a stock trader, software factory, anything. I tried switching to another harness but…

> Harnesses are the next frontier. If LLMs are electricity, harnesses are the “electronics.” I really though this comment was a satire ...

E = mc^2 + AI

Re: What Is a Harness?

#54

The ai hype word for 2026 after agent in 2025 for any LLM powered application. Well kind of, I wouldn't be surprised to see that some things marketed as agents are actually good old deterministic software.

It's really funny (and a bit obnoxious) to watch the vocabulary from the outside. In 2023 everybody learned the word moat, then it's been agent(ic), from last year there's more talking about harnesses than at a bungee jumping convention. The mot du jour is frontier.

It truly proves like there's a handful of thought leaders on Twitter that everybody follows blindly and start to copy down to the lexicon and parrot everywhere else.

Re: What Is a Harness?

#55
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to move from Claude Desktop to Pi, but I found it a little unfriendly. Any tips to set it up?

Pi doesn’t have a UI like Claude Desktop. It also doesn’t work with the Claude subscription, only API key and pricing. So if you do want to use it, use the Codex sub. Once you install it, run Pi and /login and you’ll get login with ChatGPT. From there, Pi can tweak it’s settings if you ask. Check out their extensions (or ask Pi) and that will take you most of the way there. What hiccups were you having?

> It also doesn’t work with the Claude subscription, only API key and pricing.

Not out of the box, but you can add agent sdk. I'm not sure how great the results will be though.

Re: What Is a Harness?

#57
post #20

Harnesses are the next frontier. If LLMs are electricity, harnesses are the “electronics.” Right now, it’s like an AC vs DC between Claude and ChatGPT, but once that settles, the harnesses will be the actual value providers. And Pi is the best harness because of the amazing extension system. You can build extensions that turn Pi into a stock trader, software factory, anything. I tried switching to another harness but…

> If LLMs are electricity, harnesses are the “electronics.” (...) the harnesses will be the actual value providers. Don't get ahead of yourself. Harnesses are not exactly rocket science and will be a commodity. The real value providers here are the hardware, then the LLM as a distant second, and at a much larger distance the harness.

Either part can be branded a "commodity" or a "sovereign privilege" depending on supply and demand.

Solar goes all the way up => power is commodity.

Some hyperscaler goes bankrupt => hardware is commodity.

Models get real good => output is a commodity, no profitable problems to solve anymore.

Open source models get good => models are commodity.

Re: What Is a Harness?

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Harnesses are the next frontier. If LLMs are electricity, harnesses are the “electronics.” I really though this comment was a satire ...

Sadly, many people have bought into the cult that LLMs will lead to AGI. I guess if that is your worldview then all this babbling about new frontiers makes more sense. They probably used an LLM to come up with this bizarre metaphor.

> Sadly, many people have bought into the cult that LLMs will lead to AGI

You can never tell if the goomba opinion of the forum will agree we have reached AGI (seen that happen on a few threads lately) or will readily call that a ludicrous proposition.

Re: What Is a Harness?

#59
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If LLMs are electricity, harnesses are the “electronics.” (...) the harnesses will be the actual value providers. Don't get ahead of yourself. Harnesses are not exactly rocket science and will be a commodity. The real value providers here are the hardware, then the LLM as a distant second, and at a much larger distance the harness.

https://www.latent.space/p/attention-interface Labs are now post-training models with Harness so that Harness now gets absorbed into the weights.

My naive intuition is that as harnesses converge on shape and models improve the first party advantage will mostly disappear.
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