Learn to build a harness, folks. It's not surprising to me that so many YC builders want to build domain-specific harnesses. If you work lon…

Learn to build a harness, folks. It's not surprising to me that so many YC builders want to build domain-specific harnesses. If you work long enough on a domain-specific problem, you quickly realize the opportunity. But you also realize how important that harness will be to stay competitive in the agentic era. From a product perspective, harnesses open up interesting new surface areas and experiences for the services/products you provide. From a technical perspective, harnesses are how you build and maintain a framework and set of best practices for how your users/customers interact with what you offer. Understanding how to build and design a harness means you can build much stronger intelligence stacks, given that you can customize it and understand the domain well. That's extremely valuable. It may not seem apparent yet, but a harness wave is coming. If you are getting started, give this list of harness papers to your agents and start upskilling: https://academy.dair.ai/papers/collections/harness-engineering If you are already a builder, try building one for your specific domain. It's a lot of fun, and you learn a lot of interesting things to enhance your current agentic tools. Either you die a system of record or you live long enough to become a domain-specific harness

Source: DAIR.AI (X) | 2026-09-12

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