The Agent Harness Battle That Will Shape Every Builder's Stack

Build AI that actually works: https://heyclarity.dev/ Self Aligned Newsletter: https://www.selfaligned.me/ I sat down with my co-founder Jonathan for our weekly AI clarity series. OpenAI dropped an open source Agents SDK and Cursor dropped their own in the same week. Two very different bets on how agent infrastructure should work and the difference matters more than most people realize. We get into how OpenAI and Cursor are betting on opposite ends of that spectrum, why AWS Bedrock partnering with OpenAI is a bigger deal than it looks, what self-healing codebases actually mean in practice, the "harness as a service" play and where it's heading, and what YC's framework for building an AI-native company from scratch gets right about removing human middleware. Timestamps: 0:00:00 — Intro + Episode Overview 0:02:00 — OpenAI Agents SDK Deep Dive 0:08:03 — Becoming a Certified AWS Bedrock Partner 0:18:38 — Cursor SDK 0:29:02 — "Harness as a Service" — Is This the New Stack? 0:38:53 — What Is an Agent Harness? Arize vs. LangChain 0:55:46 — Harness or Not? The Checklist 0:58:57 — Building an AI-Native Company from Scratch Follow Robert: Instagram ► / therobertta TikTok ► / therobertta_ LinkedIn ► / therobertta X ► https://x.com/therobertta_ Substack ► https://robertta.substack.com/ Follow Jonathan: LinkedIn ► / jmccoy