Knowledge base
What is a harness?
The machinery around an AI model: memory, tools, protocols, sandboxes and approval gates.
Definition
In one paragraph.
The harness is the machinery around an AI model: memory, tools, protocols, sandboxes and approval gates. The same model performs completely differently in a different harness — the bigger difference between AI systems is rarely the model and almost always the layer around it.
Why it matters.
Reliability is design
A demo needs a model; a system that keeps working needs a harness.
Tools and memory
What the agent may use and what it remembers determines what it can do — more than the model version.
Gates for the human
Approval gates and sandboxes make autonomy grow on evidence, not on upfront trust.
We wrote a full dossier on it, with worked examples. Read The Harness
All terms
Back to the knowledge base overview.