Agent = model + harness

Last Tuesday we gave a talk in Bratislava to a company's software team. What was planned as 90 minutes turned into 124. When that happens, you know the topic landed.

Individual, not shared

Halfway through, someone in the room put it in one sentence: everyone had their own rules, nothing shared. Almost everyone on the team already uses an agent daily, Claude Code and Codex, several on full plans. Getting started wasn't the problem.

The problem was that everyone built it alone. Their own rules, their own workflow, their own context. Nothing shared with the person sitting next to them.

Agent = model + harness

That's exactly what led us to the idea we put together live, in the room: an agent is a model plus the harness it operates in.

You buy the model. It gets better every month, and you have zero influence over how. That's true whether you're a developer, a marketer, or a company owner. A model is something you rent, not own.

The harness is different. That's your work. Rules, context, review, everything that tells the agent what to do and what a good result looks like. A company builds it itself, not the model vendor. And if it's built well, it compounds. Every following month gets easier, not harder.

Why this matters for you too

Without a harness, everyone on the team runs a different version of the same tool. Maybe even a different goal. In a small company you survive that. In a growing team, it turns into chaos nobody notices until it's too late.

We've seen this elsewhere too. Dispatchers at KIABA Spedition used to spend 30 to 45 minutes finding a carrier, everyone their own way. Today it takes under two minutes, not because they got a better model, but because they got a shared harness nobody had before.

That's it

This is a bigger shift than any new model. It's not about which tool you use. It's about the harness you build around it, and that's work nobody else will do for you.