Harness is the new app
a look into everyone's AI usage
The newsletter for the technically curious. Updates, tool reviews, and lay of the land from an exited founder turned investor and forever tinkerer.
Hey folks,
Busy house over here as we welcomed our third, Poppy, on Thursday last week. The twins are chuffed to have a baby sister (although Max asked “where’s my boy” when we came home on Friday 😂).
On to the news!
People are just realizing that “Harness is the new app” but this was very clear early this year when we saw Claude and Gemini play pokemon. We’ve been talking about it since May but it’s gaining even more momentum now. Cursor is talking about improving their harness for Codex models and Poetic used a custom harness Gemini 3 Pro to get the best score on ARC-AGI 2.
Google upgraded Deep Think with Gemini 3 for Ultra plan users ($250/mo). Shopify’s CTO and prev. Head of AI at Microsoft, Mikhail Parakhin, thinks the new version is better for coding something from scratch and notices more corner cases (and it’s faster), but still has some rough edges.
You can now delegate tasks to Claude Code directly from Slack. I played around with Claude Code on the desktop app and it’s a nice interface for Claude as an Agent. I won’t be surprised if Claude app starts to look like that by default in 2026.
Folks at HuggingFace got Claude Code and other CLIs to fine-tune an open model. It’s available as a skill. Here’s an idea for you to steal: make a local email processing app with a 3-7B model.
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ps: GPT-5.2 is likely coming this week, and Google will launch its first AI glasses in 2026.
🌐 What I’m consuming
Your experts won’t train your AI. You have to interview them.
How I keep up with AI-generated PRs.
Droid-maxxing - Pushing AI-assisted development to its limits.
Google Illuminate is quietly becoming the best research tool I didn’t know I needed.
Better ways to build self-improving agents - A recap of 2025 NeurIPS research papers.
A profile of ChatGPT’s product chief, Nick Turley.
Antropic’s resident philosopher, Amanda Askell, answers questions about AI.
Stop juggling 5 APIs. AssemblyAI handles multilingual speech-to-text, speaker & topic detection, and PII redaction in one stack. $0.15/hr, pay-as-you-go, no lock-in. Get free credits and start shipping features faster.*
⚙️ Tools and demos
Concierge.ai - Engage & convert inbound website visitors into qualified leads with a custom AI answer engine trained on your brand & content.*
Integrations by Parallel AI - Get fast and cheap search data right in Google Sheets, Zapier, n8n and more.
Open Scouts - Open source web monitoring that alerts you when anything changes (ticket drops, restocks, news, etc).
Private Notes - 100% offline AI note-taking iOS app (built with Droid).
Stitch by Google Labs can now convert a design image generated by Nano Banana Pro into HTML. Another Google Labs product, Mixboard, also got some upgrades.
You can now connect Replit Agent to remote MCP servers.
Normal - Your team’s branding partner.
🥣 Dev Dish
Claude history explorer - Python CLI tool to explore, search and visualise your Claude Code conversation history.
QMD by Tobi Lutke - On-device search engine for everything. A combination of BM25 full-text search, vector semantic search, and LLM re-ranking.
📋 State of AI reports
OpenRouter released a “state of AI” report based on 100 trillion tokens used on their platform. Mostly focuses on how OSS models are used.
Anthropic Interviewer - Anthropic interviewed 1,250 professionals about working with AI to map their emptions and expectaations. They are now opening it Claude users too (you should see a popup if you visit Claude on Web).
The State of Enterprise AI by OpenAI - Haven’t got the chance to dig into this one but saw this chart. Top AI users use it much more than median users.
🍦 Afters
Supabase is launching a white-label offering for platforms to help them provide fully managed database services. (I’m an investor)
Axiom Prover solved 9/12 problems in the Putnam competition (often called as the hardest college-level math test).
Rnj-1 by Essential AI is a strong 8B model, founder Ashish Vaswani is co-author of the Transformers paper.
MosaicML’s (acq. by Databricks for $1.3B) founder, Naveen Rao, has a new company, Unconventional AI, raising $475M in seed funding at $4.5B valuation.
Limitless (fka Rewind, working on AI device in pendant form) has been acquired by Meta.
That’s it for today. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts. 👋
Read about me and Ben’s Bites
📷 thumbnail creds: @keshavatearth,
Thanks to today’s sponsors who made this newsletter possible :)
Wanna partner with us? Last few slots left for the rest of the year.
Great newsletter as usual but a surprising amount of really obvious typos and mistakes in the last set of bullets. Thought you should know if you didn't already.
Re: Dual interviewers: we used to interview candidates for residency in pairs; we traded interlocutor and observer/ note-taker roles. It was fascinating to compare the deliverables, namely, the different takes on the same candidate in the same interview session.