alt Hacker News> Consider what someone who doesn't use AI would take away reading that quote from the article, and what harnesses were actually made for.
Or you could just communicate the point that you have in your head yourself instead of hoping I do it for you and then arrive at your conclusion when I just reached my own different, independent conclusion after making the same consideration.
Man, how is everyone so wishy washy on this subject? Why not give us the blurb you would write instead for that article and audience?
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Without a harness, all an LLM can do is output text tokens. Nothing else. It's the harness that allows it to read a file, write a file, run commands, start subagents. But even a simple chat application would need a harness, because something has to take the input from the user, mark it up that it's a user message, then parse the LLM's generated tokens and display the message content, or diplay a referenced image inline, or whatnot. All of this is independent of any kind of safety or filtering of naughtiness.
Harnesses exist to give models tools to do work beyond generating text. People install Claude Code and Codex to have models work inside their repositories and run the code or tests themselves instead of the user having to copypaste code between their IDE and a chat interface. The fact that there's some security built into the harnesses is just a practical consideration, not its primary function.