Technology

Since the dawn of computing, an inescapable tension has existed between two forces: centralisation and distribution. Mainframes needed terminals to make them usable, until PCs farmed out some compute to the desktop. The internet replaced the desktop with the cloud, and the smartphone became a supercomputer in your pocket. Now AI harnesses are following the same pattern with AI models.

An AI harness, sometimes called a scaffold, is a piece of software that sits between the user and the AI model (the LLM), and helps ensure that the model properly understands what you need it to do. Models are, in effect, distillations of all human knowledge. This generalisation can easily work against a user's intentions, without either the user or the model intending for this to happen. A harness metaphorically steers the model in the correct direction, hence the name.