The argument started in April, in a piece called “It’s the Harness, Stupid”, where I made the case that orchestration beats model quality. On July tenth I published the follow-up, “What Is Harness Engineering? And Do You Need to Learn It?”, which defined the terms and gave the model vendors a fair hearing. Their position is that the scaffolding you build gets absorbed into the next model, so don’t over-invest in it. I said then that nobody at Anthropic had told anyone not to learn harness engineering, and I meant it.
This episode is not a reading of that piece. Two months on, my view has sharpened, and I want to talk about my current thinking on the subject..
