Harness
scaffold, agent harness, agent scaffold
In one sentence
The software wrapped around a model (the system prompt, tool definitions, loop control and sandboxing) that turns raw weights into something able to act, as opposed to the model's own reasoning.
Why it matters
A model on its own only produces text. The harness, sometimes called the scaffold, is everything wrapped around it: which tools it may call, how errors get fed back, when it summarises or clears context, what stops it looping forever. "Agent equals model plus harness" is the shorthand: same weights, very different results, because the harness decides what the model is allowed to see, do and retry.
Sources
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