saved
The Harness Is the Company
Hraness wrote this summary from a saved copy of the source. Quotations are taken word for word from the source.
gist
Shrivu Shankar argues that a software company becomes a harness around a stateless model: the infrastructure, interfaces, context, and state that actually get work done. He traces a path from no harness, to people operating agents, to people orchestrating background agents, to harnesses orchestrating people and spending human taste only where it matters. Differentiation then sits in that outer loop, so companies should keep it in-house and plug vendors into specific inner workflows rather than renting the whole business.
ideas
- A harness is the system around the model. It is the infrastructure, interfaces, context, and state that turn a stateless LLM into work, including smaller harnesses under a meta-harness.
- The trajectory ends with harnesses directing people. Companies move from selling ordinary software, to staff running agents, to background agents, to agents choosing the work while humans review samples.
- Taste is the scarce input, not more generation. A good harness spends employee and customer attention only on the product, architecture, and design calls that change the outcome.
- Keep the outer loop and rent the inner ones. In-house tools are an early sign; a vendor can later own spec-to-pull-request, but outsourcing the whole loop commoditizes the business.
quotes
“Every SaaS business will become a harness around a model, whether or not they’ve realized it yet.”
“The work to produce the software service has moved from people to the harness.”
“Humans are part of the harness.”
“Harnesses go from internal tooling you’d happily buy to something you’d no more outsource than your product-eng org or your GTM team.”