I thought Stratechery's piece on Agents and Bubbles was interesting.
- I thought Stratechery's piece on Agents and Bubbles was interesting.
- But I think Ben is making an error in thinking that the harnesses inherently have strategic power.
- All that matters, as with most things in the software industry, is where the meaningful state accretes.
- The harnesses for the most part don't accrete any useful state; it accumulates outside the harness, in the code and data the harness produces.
- This is on the user's own turf, very much under their control.
- Another funny thing about the performance of harnesses: the ones with fewer tools tend to work better than the ones with more!
- That means despite the harness being incredibly central, there isn't a lot of strategic power they accumulate.
- Especially in a world where software is trivial to clone due to LLMs.