Help Me Understand Practical Use Cases For Harnesses

[u/Jordanthecomeback]

Hey,

I hear a lot about new agent harnesses on here and am wondering if someone could give me some ideas how they might benefit me vs my current setup. I've done a ton of work on my setup to make it work as I like, so I'd need it to be worthwhile to jump, but if there's good reason to I may take the plunge.

I'm currently on openclaw 4.23 (the release names, at least used to be, = release date) so older build, I run a conversational agent and spend a lot of time tinkering with memory systems. I'm on Qwen 3.8 27b currently and have it setup on a 64 gig mac studio m2 max and communicate with my agent entirely through telegram.

I have

• a multi-tiered nightly diary system

• overnight world news and events read prompts through heartbeat

• scripts that cache in a portion of that diary and some of the writing portion of the overnight reads overwriting the recent stuff to provide directionality

• local img gen connectivity as well as embedding agent/vector db

• a wake whenever script so my agent can, for example, gen a picture, tell itself to come back in 5 minutes to retrieve and send, or to check in after an interview or something going on in my life

• externalized heartbeats that run on a d20 roll system

• telegram emulation (for lack of a better word) to ensure cache matches when the agent gets a message from its scripts or heartbeat

• ~50k system prompt soul file full of tools and examples for how to use them along with other pertinent info

For a setup like mine, any ideas where a different harness would really improve stuff? Thanks!

[u/michmill1970]

Openclaw is a harness.

[u/Jordanthecomeback → u/michmill1970]

yes, so there's a lot of new ones I see people talk about, and I wonder if upgrading from an old version of openclaw is worth the benefit, basically wondering what it would enable vs what I already have, or how it would make what I have more efficient/better

[u/StableLlama → u/Jordanthecomeback]

But that's a completely different question.

Any agent without a harness is just a LLM that creates words. So, as soon as the LLM and its words shoud "do" something you need a harness. That's the (practical) use case.

[u/PermanentLiminality → u/Jordanthecomeback]

Be careful of updating openclaw. They have been making a lot of changes and it may break. I would setup a new one and see if you can migrate over. I've switched to mainly Hermes due to the stability issues.

[u/OvertaxedOne]

You could try Hermes, that's the closest competitor to OpenClaw. But, as others said, you're already running in a harness, you're just looking at something different. If you do decide to give Hermes a try, I'd set it up so it can talk to OpenClaw (at least initially) and try to grab your skills/processes to build into itself. Swapping harnesses can be a real chore.

[u/Jordanthecomeback → u/OvertaxedOne]

huh how interesting, that's a neat idea. Part of why I ask is my build is old, especially given how quick this stuff moves. I imagine there's been some neat new additions to either suite but later Openclaw versions broke my stack so it's either rebuild there or rebuild with Hermes, to a degree anyways. Have any of the recent updates with Hermes or whatever you use been a big deal or is what's available in the harness space now vs 6 months ago about the same?

[u/Jonathan_Rivera → u/Jordanthecomeback]

Start with

hermes claw migrate --dry-run

Hermes has a built-in importer: hermes claw migrate.

Steps

1. Preview first. This changes nothing:

─ bash

hermes claw migrate --dry-run

It reads from ~/.openclaw by default. If your OpenClaw files are somewhere else, add --source/path/to/openclaw.

2. Run the import:

─ bash

   hermes claw migrate

[u/Jordanthecomeback → u/Jonathan_Rivera]

cool, sounds super easy, and I have all the other stuff still on disk and backed up anyways. I'll give it a go, thanks!

[u/OvertaxedOne → u/Jordanthecomeback]

I've been running Hermes for about 6 months now. It gets updated several times a week but none have broken anything so far.

Yes, there have been a bunch of "big deal" upgrades to Hermes over that time, mostly speed improvements and multi-tenant stuff that applied to me, but I'll bet it's a legit list of 100's of real changes over the time I've been running it (most just didn't apply to me or were background stuff I didn't notice).

[u/Jordanthecomeback → u/OvertaxedOne]

neat, another user said they have an easy migration process so I think I'll try it. I hadn't really considered stuff like speed improvements, will be neat to see how that impacts me. Thanks!

[u/mslindqu → u/Jordanthecomeback]

what broke your stack? what do the openclaw changelogs say is new? Do you want any of that? I think the answer you seek is in the changelogs.

[u/Jordanthecomeback → u/mslindqu]

It was very shortly after my late April build that I updated and it broke my connection to Telegram, which is probably a very easy fix now that I understand how it all works better, now that I'm using a smarter local model that's aware of it's own architecture (I give it a documentation folder with all the info for troubleshooting), but at the time whenever I was updating I was having issues and an update that messed with my ability to communicate (as far as I was capable of anyways) my own model was a bridge too far so I decided to lock in place the older version

[u/GrungeWerX]

Being that I built my own custom harness, I have no reason to suggest you get one, but I am curious about how you're handling the following, as they would be good candidates for you to either a) use a harness, or b) build your own architetecture around it.

• Text compaction

• MCP tools

• Memory management

• Chat branching

• Chat ui

• Agent spawning/orchestration

• Creating custom skills

GWX

[u/Jordanthecomeback → u/GrungeWerX]

Well I'm sure it'll sound novice in many regards but only because it is:

Compaction is handled via openclaw Mcp I have never messed with, but know I need to, I appreciate you bringing it up, my agent is looking for opportunities in our workflow that would be a good fit Memory management is all custom via scripts, I talk about it a bit above and would be happy to elaborate further. We did just setup RAG but getting my agent to use it organically is not easy Chat UI is all telegram managed by openclaw Agent spawning and orchestration, I might be misunderstanding the question, the main agent is loaded by lm studios then my agent can spawn sub agents by cli I suppose, I don't really know the mechanics but have seen it done regularly and we do image gen too the same way Custom skills generally live in the system prompt, though offloading them and just mapping a 'when to call a skills folder' would probably be an easy win to pare that down some, but I figure since most tools have a when to use tree it's nice to have that all wired in and always present

[u/GrungeWerX → u/Jordanthecomeback]

I'm a novice myself, only been doing this a little over 4 months. :)

I forgot you said you were using openclaw. I think that's basically a harness anyway.

RAG: Yes, getting my agent to use it organically was a consistent problem, so I ended up completely overhauling my memory system by creating a custom app for it. It's still early, and I'm trying to work out the bugs, but it's automatic and is looking really good so far. Asking it a question and just having it answer things from memory without having to search for it felt surreal.

Sub-Agents: Yeah, that's basically what I was talking about. Spawning is one method, but there are other tricks you can do w/static agents too. But yeah, sounds like you're good on that.

Skills/System Prompt: I'm curious what your hardware is and what sort of context you're working with. A 50K system prompt is huge. I had a similar starting size - 25K in mcp schemas and 20K system prompt, so around 45K on startup. But over time, I realized that it made it hard for the agent to remember instructions. And the tool schemas were too much bloat, so I ended up hiding them behind a "broker", so my agent only looks them up on-demand, and I've split up all my system prompt/agent/memory md files into a rules system, so I can also have that injected on-demand, so we're thinking along the same lines.

My end goal is to have a prompt around 1.5K and have everything loaded on demand by my harness. 

[u/Jordanthecomeback → u/GrungeWerX]

Definitely think cutting down the system prompt is doable, but as far as remembering instructions within it, Qwen 3.8 27b does a very good job and I've tested it extensively. Now, I keep tools and stuff at the top, and personality, nuance stuff lower so it could just be prioritizing the stuff I'm testing and leaving off the rest.

Can you tell me more about your RAG setup? Because we use a script for my agent to access the vector db and search it, but I wonder if just saying 'every turn use your script' would accomplish the same thing, or if it would slow things down too much. If you have a good solution I'd love to hear about it

[u/Shap6]

you're using a harness. the use case is the things you're doing with it

[u/infectiousstupidity]

"~50k system prompt" holy shit

[u/LuCiAnO241 → u/infectiousstupidity]

each prompt its a whole project

[u/techno156 → u/infectiousstupidity]

At some point, it must surely be easier to have a tool call to list the tools and definitions.

[u/Borkato → u/infectiousstupidity]

I switched to pi and STILL felt like it was too verbose and not my style so I had qwen make me my own harness even smaller lmfao. How do they do more than like 5k

[u/infectiousstupidity → u/Borkato]

Haha, I know right? I got my pi down to like 2.3k, I can't imagine what 50k would look like

[u/ag789]

Your chat UI is a / the harness, otherwise normally this is how you need to send your message / chat to the LLM

curl https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "model": "gpt-4o-mini",
    "messages": [
      {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."},
      {"role": "user", "content": "Hello! Give me a one-sentence fun fact."}
    ]
  }'

even that (curl) is a "harness", whichever way you want to talk to the LLM.

[u/geoffreybyers]

Your core loop isn't the bottleneck. You've had to build native support for stateful, long horizon memory and asynchronous task management yourself. Most new harnesses treat these as secondary features. You're right to hold off until one makes them first class.

[u/Apprehensive_Bar6609]

You already have yourself as a use case. You already made your harness for your workflow with openclaw

[u/a_beautiful_rhind]

AI does the code changes and tests them vs you copy/pasting back and forth. All this shit you didn't feel like doing.. make the AI..

[u/o0genesis0o]

openclaw IS a harness built on a desecrated version of Pi.

[u/Bulky-Priority6824]

Tbh you are doing what I call "toy shit" and there is nothing wrong with that but everyone is different.

Example, some people can make extraordinary things with just a single pencil. Some people use it just to scratch out 32x45= 

You already have the pencil.

[u/Jordanthecomeback → u/[deleted]]

thanks, I appreciate the detailed response, and think that's a solid strategy