My 2c:

The word harness brings the truth of LLMs back down to Earth.

it really felt like between 2018 and 2022ish like LLMs had this magical aura, like the orchestration layer was intelligent, maybe even recursive, beyond what simple functions could do. It was assumed that this was a solved problem. The word "orchestration" denoted it, the words we used were full of optimism. When you lift the veil, it really is just regex, and cool tricks sure, but it's a harness it's a utility, there's no magic here, there's realism.

Maybe the labs even had a part to play in this as well; attempting to make themselves look magical. I mean just look at the choice of name for "Mythos", it's about bringing back that feeling of myth and magic after we saw under the veil.

The reality is that the labs have produced magical models yes, but are locking them into ecosystems that leave a lot to be desired, and are easily reproducible, and essentially are cron jobs, regex.. things we've seen in traditional cloud for decades. It feels like an attempt to create a moat where there is none.

Maybe I'm wrong but this has been my impression

Harness itself was a widely used term by at least the "[LLM] plays pokemon" trend, which was a year ago[1]. That was basically the term of art to use when arguing about just how much special treatment LLMs should get.

"harness engineering" is the term claimed by that article to have originated in February. It does seem obvious in retrospect and I don't remember an origination point, but there's at least one hn comment predating that in December[2] and it doesn't treat it as novel.

I will admit that my bias is against any self congratulatory buzzword fads (I'm still not over "MCP is the USB of LLMs" or whatever and that's been a year now too). "Who coined the term harness engineering?" -> who cares? It was already widely being done.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7mqp8uRnnPdbBzJZE/is-gemini-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46331242