The following article originally appeared on The Arize Blog and is being republished here with the author’s permission.

Every time you think you’ve just got the hang of this AI thing, another thing gets declared “dead.” This week, it’s agent harnesses .

Back in ancient history, aka June, I wrote a piece called “ Frameworks are dying, harnesses are winning ” and I don’t take that back. But this week a research team took a specialized agent harness, trained its behavior into a model and then took the harness away. The trained model handily beat the original model+harness combination. So are harnesses done now?

Betteridge’s Law applies, so the answer is “no.” But the job of the agent harness is changing. Parts of a harness that are sufficiently generalizable can be trained into the model. That leaves your harness holding the things that make your application unique: your tools, your data, your users, and your environment.…