The Harness Is the Company

An uninspired vision of the future. We have endless evidence through history that hiring the most engineers, producing the most output, raising the most money is not the path to success. The most successful businesses are those that deeply understand something about their customers, about how to sell to their buyers. The most has never mattered. An army of agents doing endless busywork is not the path to success.

Google isn’t successful because it has the best engineers, it has the best engineers because it is successful. Google is an extremely boring business: show adverts to make money. And they made so much money. The next Google is not going to be the company with the best “harness” it’ll be the company that has an obscenely profitable product.

Founder mode, what was considered a panacea just 12 months ago, is defined by a founder giving a shit about everything. You don’t succeed by handing everything off to an army of ~agents~ consultants.

This vision of the future is nonsense that will not pan out. You can add that to the HN AI predictions. At no point will real businesses be “harnesses” around AI models.

I go back and forth on this.

But to pull something from the post:

> If this is the right mental model, you should expect to see:

> An unusual amount of in-house harness building on both the build side and the sell side

Yup.

> Org structures and individual roles being reshaped around their place in the business harness

Not yet, this is the one I am most skeptical about because it's still way too easy for the harness-driven processes I've seen to go off the rails, so it's still very much human SME-driven. However, the number of butts in seats required is going down.

> AI-native startups beating incumbents in domains where the “moat” can be easily harness-ified

In most cases I've seen the "moat" is not easily harness-ified, and increasingly the money and energy seems to be going into getting to the starting line.

> All software a software company uses (on or tied to the core build or sell paths) needing to be headless so the outer harness can run it

Tech companies are definitely doing it, but I don't think this is actually realistic yet for companies whose core competence isn't software. But this feels like a matter of when, not if.

A lot of (non-software) business is already like this, without the AI part.

There are 40,000 McDonald’s franchisees who basically just put money into a coinop machine and the machine returns with exactly the food, drinks, restaurant decor, prices, etc that it wants them to sell.

Toyota’s production system coordinates what gets made and when, detects abnormalities and directs human attention toward problems and improvement. They explicitly eliminate the need for people to continuously watch machines, while preserving human judgment

This couldn't be more true. Companies will be driven by AI harnesses (as defined by this article) that automate decision-making and prioritization. In the medium term, may the company with the best harness win.

In the longer term, the downstream impact is massive commoditization of software and invalidation of most existing moats. Data moats are gone if you can simulate the data with AI. Even platform effects can be sidestepped if AI replaces one side of the platform.

In addition, while right now agile startups have the advantage, at some point the balance will start tilting towards whoever has the most tokens (OR perhaps durable moats will trump even near-infinite tokens; we will have to see). Startups have a limited time window to have whatever impact in the world they are hoping to have, or to build a moat that won't be disrupted by AI, but there are few of them left in the world.

The upside is that when there is a lot of commoditization, then the consumer benefits.

I agree with this. I’ve seen it in my workplace but even more profoundly in my personal endeavors where I have more freedom to explore.

My current project is created by one-shot prompts. That’s not some kind of parlor trick. It is the framework for creating and evolving the product.

Many people laugh it off as “unserious”. But as I said, I see this happening in my place of work where people are paid lots of money.

https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/sojourn-for-ios-was-45-one...

> 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.

I couldn't have said this better myself. If you're not owning your harness, and you're not owning your model, then that leaves very little moat for any AI native company.

Wait a minute - and who is going to buy that software exactly?

Because someone was so sick of expensive Adobe Photoshop they created their own vibe coded PhotoShop for $2000 worth of tokens and then selling it on for way cheaper. [0]

Some YouTuber got so sick of Adobe Premier they literally vibe coded their own full fledge video editor exactly to their needs with everything else that they don't need stripped out. [1]

I know of a case where a totally non technical person sitting in an south asian city wrote his own financial management software for his business in just three weeks. Vibe coded and now his daily driver tracking accounts, payables, receivables, contracts, parses PDFs from his inbox, populates forms and full workflow that HE needs for his specific commission/resale/distribution business.

So what this company is going to sell with that Harness? Or would it be selling just that Harness to other companies like those Rails bootstrap SaaS boilerplate businesses that used to charge $300 for that junk with lifetime update promise?

EDIT: Formatting

[0]. https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1wpaies/my_vibe...

[1]. https://youtu.be/qOQ3MEx6czY

this is rage bait whether intentional or not. Next time please think before you blog

> Harnesses orchestrate individuals

I feel this is probably coming and perhaps inevitable, but I fear for the poor employees this sort of thing will be tried out on first.

Corporations are harnesses over property, logistics, knowledge, processes, and capital.

The harness controls the AI input and output into an outcome that requires judgement.

The human part is that judgement. Not the decisions - we can pass that off but what is a 'good' thing?

Tomatoes in your fruit salad? Tomatoes are fruit. Olive oil in your engine? Lubricants are lubricants.

AI slop creates software and documents and websites very quickly. It passes the tests. It does the thing but can it be trusted? Consistent positive judgement calls create a track record and that creates trust.

This explains the anticipation about Jev.

Trust is now what sells to the highest bidder.

The harness is the universe

All harnesses are basically the same. Why wouldn't there be a few large harnesses that everyone uses to run the whole business? In other words, why would there be a plethora of small harnesses and not a few big ones?

Who ever wrote this it seems it never built any serious software. Software factories don’t exist and you will put yourself in a corner in a dangerous position