WHAT A HARNESS IS

CHAPTER SUMMARY An agent harness is all the software around a model that turns it into a dependable agent. The model is a stateless reasoning engine, and the harness is the runtime environment that supplies memory, tools, limits, and recording. The control plane decides how agents run, communicate, and recover, much like an airport control tower. The brain-and-body analogy shows that intelligence needs a body to do real work. Exact, remembered, limited, secured, and recorded things belong to the harness, while interpretation and language belong to the model. KEY TERMS REVIEW Agent harness: the software infrastructure around a model that makes it a reliable agent. Runtime environment: the surroundings in which a program runs, with its resources and rules. Control plane: the layer that decides how agents run, communicate, and recover. Routing: sending each task to the right worker. CLI: a program used by typing text commands. While-loop: a programming construct that repeats while a condition is true.