Does harness matter more than the model?

This post argues that the 'harness'—the infrastructure, tooling, and deployment strategies used to serve an AI model—can be more critical than the model itself for practical applications. It highlights that effective serving mechanisms are essential for achieving desired performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency, implying that significant engineering effort should be directed towards building robust serving harnesses. The core technical contribution is the framing of serving infrastructure as a primary engineering concern in AI deployment.