Rethinking Agents - Harness is All you Need?

Thanks to DataImpluse for sponsoring this video: https://dataimpulse.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=engineerprompt Two new papers from Stanford and Tsinghua just put hard numbers on something most agent builders have been feeling — the orchestration code wrapping your LLM now drives more performance variation than the model itself. Same model, six-times the gap, depending entirely on what researchers are calling the harness. If you build agents, the lever you should be pulling is almost never the one you've been reaching for. LINKS: Tsinghua University: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25723 Stanford University: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28052v1 My voice to text App: whryte.com Website: https://engineerprompt.ai/ RAG Beyond Basics Course: https://prompt-s-site.thinkific.com/courses/rag Signup for Newsletter, localgpt: https://tally.so/r/3y9bb0 Let's Connect: 🦾 Discord: https://discord.com/invite/t4eYQRUcXB ☕ Buy me a Coffee: https://ko-fi.com/promptengineering |🔴 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PromptEngineering 💼Consulting: https://calendly.com/engineerprompt/consulting-call 📧 Business Contact: engineerprompt@gmail.com Become Member: http://tinyurl.com/y5h28s6h 💻 Pre-configured localGPT VM: https://bit.ly/localGPT (use Code: PromptEngineering for 50% off). Signup for Newsletter, localgpt: https://tally.so/r/3y9bb0 00:00 Harness Beats Model 01:12 What Is a Harness 02:44 What's wrong with Harness Today 04:02 Ablations and Compute Costs 05:25 Natural Language Migration Win 06:29 Sponsor Data Impulse 08:02 Meta Harness Auto Optimization 10:00 Transferable Harness Insight 11:31 Subtraction Principle 13:12 Audit Checklist for Builders