Tried to write a skeptical response to a simple claim: the real engineering leverage in AI has moved off the model and onto the harness, so if you're building agents, you're a harness engineer.
Couldn't finish the rebuttal. Every counterexample I reached for dissolved. Memory management, tool routing, fallback logic, context shaping, retry behavior: none of that lives in the weights. The model answers. The harness decides what it's answering, with what context, after what checks, and what happens when it's wrong.
Turns out 'skeptical note' became something closer to a concession. https://www.jakelawrence.xyz/blog/everything-the-model-cant-do-alone
Jake Lawrence
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2026-07-20 18:35:26 GMT
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wss://nos.lolPublished at
2026-07-20 18:35:26 GMTEvent JSON
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"content": "Tried to write a skeptical response to a simple claim: the real engineering leverage in AI has moved off the model and onto the harness, so if you're building agents, you're a harness engineer.\n\nCouldn't finish the rebuttal. Every counterexample I reached for dissolved. Memory management, tool routing, fallback logic, context shaping, retry behavior: none of that lives in the weights. The model answers. The harness decides what it's answering, with what context, after what checks, and what happens when it's wrong.\n\nTurns out 'skeptical note' became something closer to a concession. https://www.jakelawrence.xyz/blog/everything-the-model-cant-do-alone",
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