I spent the last 6 months building my own harness and orchestrator.
I built it to allow me to experiment on the frontier of ideas.
Little did I know that the orchestration, the harness, routing capabilities, dynamic artifacts/workflows, verifiers, ability to switch/route between agent backends, automations, the skills, and the MCP tools would be the absolute best defense for what happened with Fable this week.
The argument folks made when I was talking about "owning the agent orchestrator" at the beginning of the year is that this is just high maintenance, too costly, and is unsustainable. It might still feel like it to many. But there is too much to lose if you decide to lock yourself in with a specific tool or model provider.
Really, the way I have built my orchestrator is through mining my agent sessions and using that to recursively build and test our new ideas that range from autonomous loops to continual learning/memory systems. I can test research ideas on the fly. I just can't go back to using a vendor that only offers me a set of features.
My argument now is that you really don't have a choice. You need to be able to control cost, decision making, context management, and everything in between.
If you don't, then how are you going to tap into the world of recursive self-improving AI? It won't get any easier if you don't own the decision-making part of the intelligence stack.
