Is Agent Harness relevant in 2026 | Ben Vinegar (Co-founder, Modem.dev)
Every voice is named by two or more agreeing sources.
“people are looking for like a quick win.”
Ben observes that many creators chase short‑term gains rather than long‑term impact.
“monthly predictions i'm not good at yearly predictions”
Mayank says he can only make short‑term forecasts, not long‑term ones.
“it's my own startup which is i guess it's an ai product”
Ben states that his current company, Modem, is an AI‑powered product.
“probably why you're you can connect it to my current startup name is you dial you basically dialed up over the phone line on a serial you know analog connection into another person's computer”
Ben describes how he used a dial‑up modem to connect to another computer, an experience that later inspired his startup.
“recommend looking into this it's probably also the beginning of me looking into open source software”
Ben suggests listeners explore the bulletin‑board software as a gateway to open‑source.
“some people i've learned don't learn it until their 20s about what they think entrepreneurship is”
Ben believes many only grasp the reality of entrepreneurship in their twenties.
“I actually encourage you to build open source software first and demonstrate that you can actually get anybody to use anything because it's really hard”
Ben suggests building open source projects first to prove value and make it easier for others to adopt.
“there's a book by camille fournier called the manager's path which is a book i recommend”
Ben recommends Camille Fournier's book The Manager's Path for aspiring engineering managers.
“i hate giving career advice by the way so this is i'll just um i'll just preface that”
He dislikes giving career advice.
“my personal philosophy is man you spend most of your day in front of a computer”
He believes most of our time is spent at a computer, shaping his work outlook.
“i'd say in the 2010s in working in the bay area i think that most workplaces looked like traditional workplaces”
In the 2010s Bay Area, most workplaces resembled traditional office settings.
“young and you are starting your career i do think you do i think you have to grind”
Early‑career engineers should work hard to reach a professional comfort zone.
“today um in the past it was bootstrapped that wouldn't even been an option back then never”
His business is now venture‑funded, whereas bootstrapping wasn't an option before.
“in a mature company that's all handled it's all handled for you you've got a team and they do this and you show up and they have everything planned for you”
Mature companies have teams that take care of logistics, leaving founders free to focus on other tasks.
“our ambition here is to have somebody you know like an agent like a teammate who's kind of working with you to do some of this busy work to take it off your plate”
Ben envisions an AI agent acting as a teammate to handle busy‑work tasks.
“the best thing ever which is cloud code and that's from where i think everything started moving a lot faster”
Mayank believes Cloud Code dramatically accelerated their development speed.
“i just put out a blog post this week which was like talks a little bit about our coding practices because it is like a pure i don't say pure but i said 99 .9 percent code gen probably summer of last year it was 90 you know 85 percent right but that number has ticked up”
Ben reports that code generation now makes up about 99.9% of their code, up from ~85% a year ago.
“me when they start rolling out claude that they're like man i'm disappointed”
Ben is disappointed with Claude's performance on messy codebases.
“they actually can scan what llm they believe generated your code and then they'll use the opposite llm to review your code”
Reptile can detect which LLM wrote code and use the opposite model for review.
“armin actually armin on our podcast because we do the monthly predictions but he asked way back in january you know do you think we're going to see more or less agent harnesses”
Ben recounts a past podcast question about the future of agent harnesses.
“just last week we're adding features to me that means that we're actually just going to still see more”
Ben predicts continued growth and innovation in agent harnesses.
“I just believe that we're going to see a lot more.”
Ben predicts continued rapid innovation in the agent space.
“did I think pie would get as popular as it did?”
Ben remarks on the unexpected popularity of the tool called pie.
“and you'll notice that a lot of interesting innovations lately have come from unemployed people.”
Ben notes that many recent innovations were created by people outside traditional employment.