# Harnesses, not agents > Source: > Published: 2026-06-08 12:00:00+00:00 # Harnesses, not agents What "agentic AI" actually ships in the wild. Most of the production agent work I do isn't really about the agent. It's about the harness — the boring stuff around the model that makes a thousand customer-shaped failures recoverable, observable, and cheap. A model that's 95% correct in a notebook becomes 0% deployable without a harness that can: time out a runaway tool call, retry an idempotent step, fan out work, surface intermediate state to a human, and roll back side effects when the plan changes mid-flight. The interesting research question of 2026 isn't "can the model do it." It's "what's the smallest, most legible scaffolding under which the model can do it the same way twice."