When i wrote my own harness, i didn't rely on what other agents do, but rather sat down and considered how i can solve the issues that i have when using other agents. And tbh, for alot of problems there are rather "simple" fixes - each comes with a cost tho. For me it was accepting to run more inference than "standard" agents but in return solving alot of issues those agents have. And to me having a full autonomous agent that i can task and just come back hours later to a solution is much more worth than just an agent that i need to "prompt jokey" the whole day.
I think its important that people don't just look at whats implemented rn, but rather just try out new things , not just "adjust" the existing ones. Thats how we got better progress, not by trying to build the 1000s variant of context compression but rather reconsider how can context be build to not have this issue (simple example).
Yes, it's so easy to build a harness for a lot of use cases now, and you learn so much from doing so.
I'm a solo developer, and I didn't want to sort out all the boundaries and permissions of Claude or other heavy harnesses. All I wanted was something that can read, write, and modify files in a project directory. I gave myself three days to see if I could make a harness that was complete enough to work on my own projects. It was usable in less than a day.
I love using it, because I know exactly what its boundaries are, and how they're enforced. When I need more features I can either implement them in my own harness, or choose a heavier harness with much clearer understanding of what to look for.