The author shares a personal experience of using harness engineering and free NVIDIA NIM endpoints to build AI agents capable of automating complex multi-step workflows, such as creating AI video series and hotel booking systems, suggesting that web crawling services can be replaced by free frontier models.
I am currently working in harness engineering, the layer of intelligence that wraps around a model to make it useful and I am really happy to report something that many here might already know but was new to me. It's become ( for me ) something rather easy to create an agent and plug it into a system that might take a few hours to make, that would then open up a computer , and do long , very complex and multi step/action flows. this has automated some things for me which have opened up capibilities I did not have before: I am creating a AI video series, for every character it finds 5 diffrent models matching my character description, picks diffrent photos and figures, expressions, then generates A.I character images, out of a set of 5 it will chose the best 2, based on how good it has turned out in relation to the character we want, then using that I continue the flow and at the end I have maybe 10 A.I images and an entire set of expressions of that character etc, this processes is done for enviornments and also for props, it's automatially added to every scene as visual cues in my scene by scene draft. -> this took me about 4 or so hours to get running, but after about 24 hours everything was generated, and using harness engineering and skill files to store processes and specific flows for repeated work it did not actually cost me much usage. For a project client I have someone who owns a hotel : I made an A.I agent that can answer the phone call and also on their site. using vision I was able to make the agent generate actions behind MCP [ model context protocol] which ran what a human would do - guests can now create bookings - cancel bookings - edit bookings so that's my use case within about 48 hours of discovering how easy it has become [ FOR ME ] , please don't feel offened, i'm just talking about how it was impossible for me before , but now its become easier. anyone using firecrawl or any other web based crawlers, I would suggest you pause and consider what I have said, those services work can be done for FREE, yes not even a cent, why is this? Because frontier level models are available for free to the public using nvidia NIM endpoints, they can be flaky but all you need to do is tell an A.I to create a tool which does a live test on the speed of each endpoint in case one of the endpoint fails, and gives you the fastest one with respect to quality of the model. To also account for quality of model, you will need to do 1 time test locally and keep store of how well each of nvidias 50-100 models perform, and rank them, in real time you just do speed which takes maximum 10-30 seconds. then you get the best available at all times. This can be deepseeks latest model or some trillion paramer model. Did I mention it's free? End of my rambling and hope this helped someone , I am available to answer your burning questions in the comments and give you advice and implimentation details for your use case happy coding.
The author describes observing an AI agent autonomously complete a competitive intelligence workflow that normally takes 4 hours in just 18 minutes, highlighting its ability to navigate websites, process PDFs, and iterate search, suggesting a move beyond simple chatbots to autonomous execution.
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