China AI Digest (May 17, 2026)

Three episodes, one thesis: the model is becoming infrastructure — value is moving outward.Hardhacker EP126 — Agent Harness. The indie-dev show defines the layer above the model: tools, permissions, context, sandboxing, and result verification. The hosts argue that the gap between a chatbox model and Claude Code is almost entirely a Harness gap — and that opinionated, workflow-specific harnesses (not models) will be the moat for the next generation of AI products.Valley 101 E236 — 99% of homework is AI-written. Three top-school 2026 graduates — from Tsinghua Law, NYU Psychology and Columbia Engineering — explain what four years of university look like when ChatGPT was a freshman classmate. AI can decide; only humans can choose. A cited study finds senior engineers using AI are 19% slower, not faster.Dafang Says AI+ 030 — Xiaohongshu suddenly all-in on AI. The 300-million-user lifestyle community runs its largest organisational restructure ever, creating a top-level AI division called Dots. The bet: use AI to defend authenticity and unify community + commerce + monetisation — not to scale synthetic content. "AI is the glue, not the factory."