The AI harness revolution

Everyone quietly stopped saying “AI wrapper” and started calling it “AI harness”, and it’s not just a vibes rebrand. It’s an admission from the ecosystem that the real game for us as founders has moved up the stack. The moat is no longer “we call OpenAI and add a UI”. The moat is deterministic orchestration. Things like: - Domain tuned tools instead of generic “call any API” chaos - Smart routing between models and prompts - Tracing so you can actually debug that one weird production response - Evals wired into your CI so prompts fail builds like bad tests - Rollback loops so when a new prompt or model breaks stuff, you can revert like it is code In other words, turning stochastic LLMs into systems that respect SLOs, not just vibes. Base models are converging on good enough for most things and becoming swappable. Today it is OpenAI. Tomorrow it might be Anthropic, local, or something your infra team fine tuned on a Sunday. The sticky value is in how you wire it all together for a specific domain, guarantee behavior, and keep it observable. The harness, not the horse.