Agent harness tuning gains fade as labs train models for their own harnesses
jdjohnson · x · 2026-10-06
A debate on whether third-party agent harness tuning still pays off: @pvncher argues that by fall 2026, many gains tinkerers found a year ago are much harder to achieve with the latest models—frontier lab harnesses aren't perfect, but models are trained to use them well, making them hard to beat.
jdjohnson adds that this holds for personal assistant tinkerers but not yet for companies: labs must serve users with wildly different needs, and their incentive is to sell you their own models, not the best model for your task. The core tension: deep coupling between models and official harnesses shrinks third-party tuning room, even when vendor incentives misalign with users' optimal setups.
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