4 ms·
> One of this year’s AI buzzwords is “harness”—the system that surrounds an LLM to keep agents on the straight and narrow. It might just as well be barbed wire
by raincole 2mo ago
> One of this year’s AI buzzwords is “harness”—the system that surrounds an LLM to keep agents on the straight and narrow. It might just as well be barbed wire.
Quite painful to read. It might be a useful introduction to AI for people who live under rocks for the past three years, but it's really weird that it's posted on HN.
- timmmmmmay 2mo agoI'm sure their coverage on other topics is truthful and informative though and it's only the ones where you know a lot about the topic where it's all a bunch of bullshit
- Loughla 2mo agoThe first time I saw the comments here on an education article (my area of expertise and career focus), I realized just how full of shit most of us are. It made me really closely consider every comment here through a VERY critical lense. The articles are usually close but not quite accurate. The comments are usually entertaining but overall wildly inaccurate.
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- datakan 2mo agoThe best comments are the ones formed as questions. I'm as guilty as anyone, but it is far more productive in comment sections to ask questions rather than saber rattle or peacock in front of people. Just my opinion of course.
- mvcosta91 2mo agoInternet comments are essentially documented bar talk, and once you realize it, you stop angrily arguing with strangers all day.
- Loughla 2mo agoYeah but HN sort of bills itself as better than most places. It just simply is not; there's just a special sort of self confidence here that masks a ton of ignorance.
- Karrot_Kream 2mo agoYeah FWIW I think that's the aspect of this place I dislike the most. There's a sort of collective fiction that HN is a special place with better comments. At least Reddit has accepted that they're just the internet's version of bar gossip.
- embedding-shape 2mo agoNot saying you aren't right, you most likely are. But still, I'd expect a paper called "The Economist" to perhaps be slightly better at some topics than others. Probably from the perspective of a "A Economist" it doesn't really matter the technical details, they're interested in the story from a different perspective.
- ls612 2mo agoThat sentence is not bullshit as normies would understand it. One of the points of a harness is to have a privilege boundary around the agent. But that is just technobabble to the normies so they explain it like this.
- 27183 2mo ago> harness ... a privilege boundary around the agent They don't really do that though. If you want something sandboxed you actually have to sandbox it, not plead with the LLM to please sandbox itself. A VM can be configured to do the former, harnesses do the latter.
- ls612 2mo agoIf you say in your CLAUDE.MD that a certain directory is read only inputs, Claude Code will actually enforce that and deny any write to that directory by the agent. To name just one example.
- 27183 2mo ago...maybe. If there are any actual consequences if that software's invariants are violated you're better off using an external sandboxing mechanism. There are many excellent quality, battle tested options to choose from that you can actually rely on. Trusting claude code for this is highly questionable behavior for an organization, and would really throw the rest of their security posture into doubt IMO. Like if I learned a company was letting clod play in the same sandbox as developers' ssh keys, vpn certs, etc I'd take steps to make sure my organization absolutely never uses their software.
- killix 2mo ago[flagged]
- jstummbillig 2mo agoThere is value in understanding what people outside of your own group of "insiders" learn about a topic, and how.
- morkalork 2mo agoThat's a real fucking weird description. It's harness like a testing harness.
- krunck 2mo agoIf an LLM were in a testing harness it would be to test the LLM. If an LLM were in a regular harness - like for a horse - it would be to keep the horse under control and enable you to extract useful work from it.
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- morkalork 2mo agoThe LLM harness and the testing harness are harnesses that support and run the thing. Also like an engine harness. People don't talk about those harnesses like ones for an animal being subdued.
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- summarybot 2mo agoit's The Economist. What used to be a stellar publication is not any longer, since they are superfluously economical on both details and calories-required-to-comprehend an article.
- gruez 2mo agoI mean, it's a < 1000 word article about AI, in the "business" section of a current affairs magazine, of all places. You really shouldn't be expecting a deep dive.
- andsoitis 2mo agoThe economist has many deep dives on AI, including fascinating interviews with the likes of Amodei, Musk, and others. A recent discussion focused on how China is approaching AI.
- cwbuilds 2mo agoIronically, that looks like something Claude would write..
- binarymax 2mo agoAnd while writing this, the top story on HN is "Deepseek Harness" :)
- hombre_fatal 2mo agoI don't get what's so painful about that description. What would you write instead, specifically? The point is that the harness doesn't completely lock the agent down. I also don't get what's "really weird" about the article showing up on HN. Should we be completely insulated from how tech topics and which stories show up in non-tech media?
- dymk 2mo agoBecause that’s not what a harness does. It’s nonsense.
- hombre_fatal 2mo agoIt's one of the things it does, especially in the context of agents doing unexpected things.
- Aozora7 2mo agoConsider what someone who doesn't use AI would take away reading that quote from the article, and what harnesses were actually made for.
- hombre_fatal 2mo ago> 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?
- Aozora7 2mo agoHarnesses 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.
- altcognito 2mo agoIt's not even a useful introduction. A harness does kinda the opposite. A harness is what makes an AI useful and dangerous. It is a neutral tool in the sense that it constructs and environment, but it is expanding what the algorithm can do. It gives the algorithm the ability to do something beyond generating tokens.
- someothherguyy 2mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_harness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_harness