The Harness Is the Company
This article argues that the future of SaaS companies lies in becoming 'harnesses'—infrastructure layers that wrap stateless LLMs with state, context, and orchestration. It predicts a shift where companies move from selling software to selling the output of proactive, agentic background processes.
Why it matters
It provides a framework for understanding how the business model of software companies is evolving as AI agents take over core operational tasks.
Every SaaS business will become a harness around a model, whether or not they’ve realized it yet.
Narrowly, folks will often associate a “harness” with frameworks like LangGraph or coding agents like Codex, Claude Code, or OpenCode, which wrap a stateless model API in enough tooling and state that you can actually get work done.
I’m using the term “harness” broadly to mean all the infra, interfaces, context, and state that surround a stateless LLM. A harness can be composed of adapted or task-specific sub-harnesses (with the orchestrator being called a “meta-harness”). A “software factory” is a harness whose parts are smaller harnesses — one that writes specs, one that writes code, one that reviews — plus something on top deciding what runs when.
If you accept this broader definition (or replaceAll “harness” with whatever phrase you’d prefer), I suspect for many software service businesses you’ll see this trajectory:
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