Stop over-engineering agents: minimal harness + strong model beats piles of skills
bendee983 · x · 2026-10-05
A candid thread argues most agent skills aren't helping — some actively hurt — because engineers cling to control, when a frontier harness + model with good prompting is enough. bendee983 shares a 4-step workflow: start with a minimal harness and a strong model, let the AI explore the problem space, add instructions/tools only where it fails, then swap to smaller models with heavier harness engineering when scaling.
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