AI Agents are Only As Effective as Their Harness

AI agents (autonomous systems that complete complex tasks with minimal human oversight) depend on large language models (LLMs, which are AI systems trained on vast amounts of text to understand and generate language) for reasoning power, but reliability comes from the 'harness'—the framework and controls surrounding the agent rather than the model itself. The piece argues that vendors focus too much on the underlying LLM's capabilities while overlooking the infrastructure needed to make agents trustworthy for critical tasks like network security.