[paulcaplan]

Thank you I greatly appreciate the feedback!!

Wow, yes I should have looked more closely at the image - which was obviously generated by Gemini Nano Banana (it usually does a better job with the text rendering). I checked the article text carefully but not the image...

And that's a great question. I'll answer it in two parts. First, I think the inner and outer are actually quite complimentary. The outer part is largely things that Claude can't provide - such as your own instructions, skills, and ways of validating things specific to your project. I have memory as part of the outer harness but Claude of course does have a memory system and it would not surprise me if they drastically improve it.

The other thing, mentioned in the article, is that harnesses (and specifically Claude) are shrinking: "As I was going through these iteration cycles, we also released Opus 4.6, which provided further motivation to reduce harness complexity. There was good reason to expect 4.6 would need less scaffolding than 4.5 did. ". (from https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/harness-design-long-ru...).

So my* core argument is you still need that "scaffolding", but it belongs in the outer harness.

[chiply]

Clear, thank you! I didn't know about Nano Banana for this! Would be cool if they let you edit the image text directly, not sure though, I've never used that tool. Impressive that it generated that!

[vunderba]

NB doesn't support direct editing of an image. But you can open the image in something like Krita or Photoshop, highlight the part you want to change with a red marker, and then ask Nano Banana to modify that highlighted section. It usually does a really good job.

In many cases you can just prompt “change this source text into this target text,” and it works in most cases.