Why does everyone assume people in the past were idiots? They probably would have figured out what this was for after some critical thinking. Remember those people wrote massive complicated software by hand.
It’s actually a funny oxymoron if you unpack it - agent implies autonomy and intelligence, harnesses are for unintelligent beasts of burden to control them.
So you’re right, it makes absolutely no sense and would be hard to decipher, but does perfectly capture the contradictions inherent in attempts to treat dumb LLM word generators as intelligent independent agents.
The concept of agents is from the 1970’s, I love how some people think the idea is new. Sure, they didn’t have the LLM component, but the rest is the same.