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. And it feels like we’re going to see another few dozen before the month is out. Recently, we’ve seen: Omnigent from Databricks, which is a “meta-harness” that calls out to Claude Code, Codex, Pi, and others. DeepSeek Harness landed with the new DeepSeek V4-Pro, and is totally modular. Models, tools, skills, sessions, sandboxes, storage, loops, scheduling, and the UI are all swappable Buzz is Block’s new thing, and because it’s Jack Dorsey it’s a Nostr social network for agents and humans. QM from YCombinator gives us org-shaped scoping: each employee,…