My harness, or whatever that means

That’s one of those words that, one year ago without context in a question, it could get you off guard. Today it appears to be pretty common in conversations. Of course I’m talking about the tools one uses to interact with LLMs and manage agent execution. Even though in the past I’ve written about my preference for local AI and even shared my setup at the time, I don’t give that much usage to any AI apart from using it as a coding assistant. I see value in things like asking it to review my code changes to ensure I haven’t forgotten anything, to generate boilerplace or even to “discuss” about the up and downsides of possible implementations to a given problem. I don’t have one of those setups that are meant to do everything, replace the human, and have a life of their own. So as you might guess, my harness is pretty simple. I essentially still use Ollama to serve some local models (that aren’t too slow on my machine). Then I use a containerized instance of pi.dev that I launch in the…