Harness design

Evolution of agentic surfaces — Gagan Bhat & Isabella Kai He, Anthropic

Evolution of agentic surfaces — Gagan Bhat & Isabella Kai He, Anthropic

Anthropic's Gagan Bhat and Isabella Kai He discuss how agent harnesses must evolve rapidly to keep pace with fast-improving LLMs. They introduce Claude Managed Agents, an architecture that decouples the agent's 'brain' (reasoning) from its 'hands' (tool execution) to address issues like stale assumptions, latency, and reliability. This approach enables dynamic adaptation, secure tool execution, and features like 'dreaming' for self-improving agents and 'outcomes' for goal-oriented task completion, ultimately aiming to close the gap between model capabilities and product offerings.

What if the harness mattered more than the model? - Aditya Bhargava, Etsy

What if the harness mattered more than the model? - Aditya Bhargava, Etsy

Aditya Bhargava argues that the 'harness' (the surrounding logic and tools) is more critical than the underlying LLM model itself for building effective AI agents. He proposes that focusing on sophisticated harness design, supported by his new language Agency, can enable local, open-source models to achieve performance comparable to large proprietary models, thereby reducing dependency and fostering innovation.