Elvis Saravia Recommends Tiny Custom Agent Harnesses First

Elvis Saravia, an AI researcher and co-founder of DAIR.AI, posted advice on X for those asking about harness engineering. He recommends skipping frameworks and instead building the smallest possible harness consisting of one agent loop, a few tools, and a system prompt written from scratch. Saravia stated that this method leads to more learning than a month of reading tutorials. The post presents his direct recommendation on starting with custom agent work.