Harness Engineering: The Model Is a Component, the Harness Is the Product
You don't ship a model. You ship everything around it.
Technical posts, product decisions, and honest observations, written while building, not after.
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What AI features look like when regular people use them in real life.
You don't ship a model. You ship everything around it.
An agent is a while loop. Everything hard is in the exit condition.
Your tool's description is its documentation, its type system, and its onboarding.
Every AI call has a marginal cost. 'Unlimited' on a fixed price means one of three things: weaker models, hidden limits later, or burning cash.
Pricing, product choices, and what I've learned trying to make things people actually buy.
Game monetization splits cleanly into predictable-and-fair and random-and-manipulative. Regulators are banning the second, and the same line runs through how any product charges.
Retention won through dark patterns is debt. It builds regulatory and reputational liability and makes every future price increase impossible.
Three tiers beat two by 27%; four or more do worse. The middle tier is the anchor, and most founders price the whole thing 30% too low.
The industry average free-to-paid conversion is 2–5%, not 40%. Spotify is the outlier you can't copy, and the cost to serve a free user decides if freemium even works.
Architecture tradeoffs, primitives over complexity, and durable system patterns.
The shared action should not inherit the latency of every feature it triggers.
Predict locally, decide centrally, and make rejection a first-class state.
The transport moves messages. Your protocol decides whether the product stays coherent.
How I make decisions, stay focused, and keep moving without a team.
You can't skip the ten. Every million starts as ten people who actually stayed.
The right model is the one your product's costs, users, and habits actually point to, not the trendy one. Ten questions get you there.
A lifetime deal is a one-time payment against a forever cost. It's launch cash that can quietly become a liability you can't cancel.