"The LLM is the brain, the harness is the body": framing agent engineering
EricBuess · x · 2026-10-20
Developer adocomplete offered a framing for agent engineering: a brain with no body just talks; a brain with a body gets things done.
- The LLM (model) is the brain; the harness is the body — the tools, files, and loop around the model.
- He recommends the Agent SDK to define that body for your specific use case.
- The framing captures a core tenet of current agent practice: beyond raw model capability, the engineered harness determines whether agents actually complete tasks.
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