Harnesses are Situated Agents

The best way to define a harness is as a “situated agent” Harrison Chase once excitedly shared an insight that agents are comprised of 4 things: a system prompt, a planning tool, a file system, and subagents. In the year-plus since he said that, I think this remains largely true. (Though you might tweak it to have general tools, etc.) Lately, we’ve been experiencing a wave of harnesses. It seems like everyday a new coding harness lands. I’m sure we’ll see another few dozen before the month is out. Recently, there’s been: Omnigent from Databricks, which is a “meta-harness” that calls out to Cla