Never argue with someone who buys their ink by the barrel.

Building an excellent harness yourself is exhausting work. It’s risky, it’s fragile, you’ll never get to perfection. Meanwhile competing against against the big AIs that buy all their tokens at cost is also a recipe to get crushed. Don’t start an argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel they said. All that said…

LLMs have become commodity. The real value now is in how you harness them.

A year ago “that’s just a wrapper company” may well have been the ultimate pejorative. I really don’t think so anymore. Context is king in AI, and specifically how effectively you use your context window, and that makes wrappers everything.

NOT trying to do everything in an LLM is key, using tools, api calls, timely data sources, memories, deterministic code or rules engines wherever possible. This is how agentic systems do real work and do it dependably. The rules, the orchestration, the library of tools, the automation, the security, the deployment, the evals, the model/cost/performance optimization is crazy work. It’s the work of the harness. Spend a season building enterprise-grade agentic systems, or just a week setting up your OpenClaw and you’ll understand first hand.

RIP wrappers. All hail the harnesses.