harnesses

A hot take from scotups argues that models are no longer the differentiator; instead, building the best harness (e.g., OpenCode, OpenClaw, Hermes, Pi) is key, as discussed in a course on Harness Engineering & Agent Orchestration.

OpenForgeRL is an open-source framework for training harness-based AI agents end-to-end in diverse environments, using a lightweight proxy and Kubernetes orchestrator to enable RL on any harness at scale. It achieves strong results on agentic benchmarks and shows that RL improves agent reliability.

The article proposes that Transformers can generalize to new tasks through a well-designed harness that induces composition, without needing intrinsic model generalization. It shows RLMs can generalize from short tasks to 8-32x longer tasks and across domains.

The article discusses the current state of computer-control harnesses that allow local vision language models to securely control a cursor in a sandbox environment.