The Evolution of the Agent Harness
Latent Space essay argues late-2025 agent gains came from models and harnesses maturing together, with harness logic absorbed into model weights.
The piece defines the agent harness as everything beyond model weights—tools, context, memory, guardrails—and charts its evolution from ReAct prompting (October 2022) through AutoGPT's premature autonomy, Cursor/Copilot's human-in-the-loop retreat, and Devin's roughly 15% success rate, to o1's capability overhang and Claude Code's February 2025 terminal agent with permission rules. It argues the Christmas 2025 jump cited by Transformer co-inventor Lukasz Kaiser reflected model and harness curves crossing, and that remaining harnesses will serve human attention rather than the model.
Inside NVIDIA’s cuDNN Graph API: Fusion, Autotuning, and Plan Reuse with cuDNN Frontend
MarkTechPost tutorial walks through NVIDIA's cuDNN Frontend graph API, covering kernel fusion, autotuning, plan reuse, and CUDA graph capture on Colab GPUs.
The tutorial explains how to express GPU computations as operation graphs via the cuDNN Frontend graph API, running the five-step build pipeline of validate, build operation graph, create execution plans, check support, and build plans. It progresses from a single fused convolution with bias and ReLU to autotuning across engine configs, FP8-style epilogues, attention, plan serialization, dynamic shapes, and CUDA graph capture. Each kernel is benchmarked against a PyTorch reference on a single Colab GPU to verify correctness and measure cost. The piece also covers practical setup issues like making libcudnn.so visible to the frontend's dynamic loader.
Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
A Hacker News thread debates whether agent skill files are worth managing, citing 2–4x output-token reductions on flagship models in one company's testing.
Commenters argue skills are stored prompts that help less-technical users compensate for weak prompting, while one participant reports company testing found skills reduce flagship-model output tokens by roughly 2–4x, a gap growing with newer models. Others note skills can bundle reusable scripts and inline commands for deterministic context building, and that harnesses now execute backticked commands before the agent sees the skill. Some argue improving model capability makes downloadable skills redundant.