The Harness is All You Need

On building mini-agents that actually work in production, and why nobody's talking about the real problem. There's a split happening in AI that most people are missing. Camp A builds "super agents." Autonomous systems that browse the web, write code, use dozens of tools, plan multi-step workflows. Devin, Manus, Operator. Gets the tweets, the funding, the demos. Camp B builds "mini-agents." Narrow, single-task decision systems optimized for accuracy at volume. No tools, no browsing, no multi-step planning. One question, answered correctly, tens of thousands of times per day. Camp B is almost entirely silent. I've spent months in Camp B, and I think the harness that produces these agents matters more than any individual agent. The Economics Consider a business process with 10,000 binary decisions per day. Each takes ~5 minutes of skilled labor. That's 104 full-time employees. Super Agent (80%) Mini Agent (97%) Automated 8,000/day 9,700/day Human review ~2,000/day (slower to fix) ~300/day