2026 Is the Year of the Harness. We Built a Different Kind.
The model itself has become the easy part. You can call Claude or GPT in three lines of code, and so the real difficulty, the part that never quite makes it into the demo, lies entirely in everything that surrounds the model: the layer that gives it tools, that runs it on a schedule or off a queue or in reaction to some external event, that retries when a tool times out, that caps how fast it hammers an external API, that keeps the secrets out of the logs and tells you afterwards what the whole thing actually cost. This scaffolding has a name, the harness, and it is where almost all of the real engineering of an AI feature actually lives.