Sonya Huang 🐥(@sonyatweetybird):An agent is three things: a harness, a model, and context. If you're serious about owning your intelligence, you probably want to own all three. @LangChain founder @hwchase17 joined us at our @sequoia Own Your Intelligence to talk about the piece that often gets the least attention: the harness. He offers a clear heuristic for when to build your own. The more out of distribution you are from what the models were trained on, the more you'll want to customize. And good technical content on how to actually measure performance with evals and langsmith. 00:00 Introduction 00:58 The three parts of an agent: harness, model, context 02:12 What a harness actually does 03:25 Customizing the core loop with middleware 04:41 Sandboxes, file systems, sub-agents, summarization 05:47 Cognitive architectures — and when you still need them 07:03 Build your own harness or use off the shelf? 08:24 In-distribution vs. out-of-distribution: the file-editing example 09:39 Why evals define what "good" means in an organization 11:04 Harbor: what an eval task actually looks like 12:11 Comparing harnesses and models on accuracy, latency, and cost 13:20 Why observability is underrated — it's usually the context 14:34 The data flywheel: traces → curation → experiments 15:42 Getting feedback through UX design and online evaluators 16:51 Demo: LangSmith Engine 19:23 Q&A: Running Engine on Engine, and "codex-ification" 20:44 Q&A: Will harnesses converge or diverge?

2026.08.13 16:13

An agent is three things: a harness, a model, and context. If you're serious about owning your intelligence, you probably want to own all three. @LangChain founder @hwchase17 joined us at our @sequoia Own Your Intelligence to talk about the piece that often gets the least attention: the harness. He offers a clear heuristic for when to build your own. The more out of distribution you are from what the models were trained on, the more you'll want to customize. And good technical content on how to actually measure performance with evals and langsmith. 00:00 Introduction 00:58 The three parts of an agent: harness, model, context 02:12 What a harness actually does 03:25 Customizing the core loop with middleware 04:41 Sandboxes, file systems, sub-agents, summarization 05:47 Cognitive architectures — and when you still need them 07:03 Build your own harness or use off the shelf? 08:24 In-distribution vs. out-of-distribution: the file-editing example 09:39 Why evals define what "good" means in an organization 11:04 Harbor: what an eval task actually looks like 12:11 Comparing harnesses and models on accuracy, latency, and cost 13:20 Why observability is underrated — it's usually the context 14:34 The data flywheel: traces → curation → experiments 15:42 Getting feedback through UX design and online evaluators 16:51 Demo: LangSmith Engine 19:23 Q&A: Running Engine on Engine, and "codex-ification" 20:44 Q&A: Will harnesses converge or diverge?