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Knowledge AI Agents April 14, 2026

Agent Harness Overview

A sketch of how agent systems split responsibilities between the model and the harness around it.

This sketch is a compact view of how I think about agent systems: the model is only one part of the system, and the harness around it is what makes the agent usable, reliable, and operational in practice.

Agent Harness Overview

What It Covers

  • the distinction between the model itself and the surrounding harness
  • how planning, memory, tools, and execution fit around a model
  • why orchestration matters once an agent has to do real work
  • where evaluation, observability, and validation sit in the stack
  • a systems view of what turns a raw model into an operational agent

It is the kind of note I want nearby when thinking about agent architecture as a full system rather than just a prompting problem.

Thanks for reading.

© 2026 Alan Wang