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Comment by sam_lowry_ | Hacker News Reader

Harness? I am an avid HN reader but even I don't yet fully understand how this word is used in the AI context. Which is exactly the point of the OP.

It all boils down to naming things and cache invalidation, /s

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That's the terminology they have chosen because they believe they are "in control". It's a purely psychological thing, not different from calling different DB servers "master" and "slave". When I explain things to people, I say: the LLM is a big mouth, and it is a big mouth without hands. It can only talk. The agent is what gives some hands to the LLM, and then it can do some work.

Harness refers to the tooling that allows you to interact with an LLM. Web chat interface is a harness, CLI coding tools (claude code, codex, opencode, pi, etc.) are harnesses, agent systems (openclaw, hermes, etc.) are harnesses. They present different capabilities to the underlying LLM. Codex, for example, is more likely to write code if you say "I want to build an app" than ChatGPT on web will.

Which is an abstraction layer that the non-technical should need to know, if we follow GP's line of reasoning.

My question is do we harness a bootstrap or bootstrap a harness?

You bootstrap css and harness js

You strap your harness to your bootstraps, and then you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps... right?

Personally I even refuse to learn what it is in the AI context. Feels like a waste of energy given new ~~~best ways to use YOUR tokens~~~ are discovered every month and things you learn now will be useless next month.

I am doing perfectly fine with the web UI version of these tools... They seem to also not make tokens dissappear as fast as using claude cli tool to automate implementations. Makes my work day more tolerable as well as I actually have something to do over waiting until some implementation can be read through...

You forgot off by one errors ;)

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