Is there still a business case for building your own agent harness?
A developer argues that OpenAI and Anthropic are rapidly expanding their own harnesses and that stronger models like Astra reduce the need for one, so reselling API tokens through a custom harness has no business case today.
We had our harness too, but OpenAI and Anthropic are pouring money to their harnesses and expanding them rapidly. They now have good context management, permanent memory, spawn sub-agents for sub-tasks, support MCPs, etc. Modern LLMs (Astra, Fable) are also much more capable nowadays. You don’t need to have to guide them as much by a harness. Also if you try to make business with custom harness and route API token purchases though it, that has no business case today. API token costs are 10x+ more expensive than monthly subscriptions. If your harness requires paying API prices for tokens, it’s dead on arrival.