What Is a Harness?

tosh 27 points 15 comments August 23, 2026
earendil.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (3 comments)

childofhedgehog

Clear, relevant, and easy to understand. Thank you for writing this up, I’ll be sharing this link with all my non-tech friends!

theturtletalks

Harnesses are the next frontier. If LLMs are electricity, harnesses are the “electronics.” Right now, it’s like an AC vs DC between Claude and ChatGPT, but once that settles, the harnesses will be the actual value providers. And Pi is the best harness because of the amazing extension system. You can build extensions that turn Pi into a stock trader, software factory, anything. I tried switching to another harness but none have extension functionality as good as Pi. Even if there is a new harness or agent project, I tell Pi to dig into the codebase and then make me an extension that brings that functionality into Pi. I did it with Prime Intellect’s and Deepseek’s harnesses and those are built on Pi.

jascha_eng

The ai hype word for 2026 after agent in 2025 for any LLM powered application. Well kind of, I wouldn't be surprised to see that some things marketed as agents are actually good old deterministic software.

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
4,152 stories · 37,486 chunks indexed