An agent is three things: a harness, a model and context.

Teams tend to spend most of their attention on the first two. The durable advantage is usually in the third.

The model is replaceable

Models get better every week. If your advantage is "we picked the smartest one," you do not have an advantage.

Choosing the right model still matters for cost, latency and capability. But the lead rarely lasts. A model that looks exceptional today may be the default option a few weeks from now.

The model will keep improving without you.

The harness turns intelligence into work

The harness matters. It provides tool calling, permissions, evaluations and the loop that lets the agent actually do work instead of merely talk about work.

A weak harness wastes a strong model. It leaves the agent unable to act reliably, recover when something fails or show a person what happened.

Harnesses are important, but they can also be replaced. Frameworks mature, integrations improve and better execution layers emerge.

Context is the part that is yours

Context only exists if you create and preserve it.

Start building it as soon as you can, and broader than feels tidy. The goal is not a perfect knowledge base. Start with the raw material:

  • Decisions and the reasoning behind them
  • Exceptions and how they were handled
  • Customer-specific context
  • The reasons the business said no
  • How work should be written and presented
  • Who owns each decision or process

This is the accumulated operating knowledge that lets an agent move from generic fluency to useful continuity.

Most teams invert the work

Teams debate models, then frameworks, then eventually notice that the agent has nothing durable to stand on.

Every session starts from zero. The agent may be fluent, but the business does not gain continuity.

A good harness with thin context is a capable intern who never received a handover.

Start this week

Context compounds slowly, which makes the starting point important.

Write down the decisions, exceptions and preferences generated by the work already happening. Keep them somewhere durable. Give the agent access within the same permissions that apply to the people doing the work.

Start broader than feels tidy. Six months from now, you will wish you had the previous six months of context available.