Would anyone pay for the harness?

The phrase has drifted into a catch-all, so the first job was to draw lines. In practice the demand clusters into three shapes:

• Augmentation — an agent embedded in an existing process (triage, drafting, enrichment) that makes a human faster without replacing the decision.
• Orchestration — a multi-step pipeline where the agent owns the sequence: fan a job across sub-tasks, handle retries, hold state across steps, and refuse to finish until a gate passes.
• Autonomy with a leash — a workflow that runs unattended on a schedule but reports to a human gate before anything irreversible.

The interesting finding: most buyers ask for the third and actually want the first. They want leverage, not abdication.

The model is a commodity — everyone is one API call from the same intelligence. The defensible work is the harness: the verification, the state, the tool integrations, the human gates, the knowing which structure to remove. That maps almost exactly onto what's already running on this site — an enrichment orchestrator that fans across five sub-agents, a deterministic playtest gate that blocks a merge on a real oracle, a content pipeline that won't publish without approval. The research mostly confirmed a hunch: the sellable asset isn't "I can call an LLM," it's "I've shipped harnesses that fail safe in production, and here's the build log."

Research isn't a plan, and a few things stayed genuinely unresolved. Pricing is the big one: agentic work resists hourly billing because the leverage is non-linear, but fixed-scope offers need a verification boundary clear enough that "done" isn't a negotiation. Liability is the second — an autonomous workflow that's wrong unattended is a different risk class than a tool a human drives. The next step is small and concrete: take one real internal workflow here, the kind a client would recognize, and write it up as a worked case study with the gate, the failure modes, and the time saved — turning the research into evidence instead of a claim.