Building agents without harness engineering

rajit 27 points 16 comments June 11, 2026
rajitkhanna.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (5 comments)

stopachka

Interesting idea! Question: > It is highly unlikely that an AI agent startup becomes wealthy by creating the best harness for a particular use case. If it's not the harness, what do you think is the thing that will differentiate AI agent startups? Is it mainly data, or something else?

adamtaylor_13

I thought the entire industry is moving toward harness engineering? I read this twice and didn't fully understand what it was telling me.

jadar

If you re-use the Hermes agent, what are the cost and security implications? One Docker container per-customer sounds like it would be really expensive. Are they started on-demand, or run 24/7? What keeps users from using the agents for general purpose tasks, protects against prompt-injection, etc?

HPMOR

I'm curious who the ideal customer of this should be. If we're a startup with our own harness, are we a good fit? What would qualify us or disqualify us from being a good user?

sidhusmart

But isn’t that the same as using Claude agent sdk minus maybe the memory features? What I mean to say is that you could pick the latest one and switch when another better one rolls out? We’re using Claude agent sdk right now to rollout an internal agent factory. We haven’t hit the memory issue yet but I do use Hermes as a personal agent and can see where it fits you.

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