Bob Belderbos: The control layer is the product, not the model (opens in new tab)

Gary Bernhardt posted something this week that names a phenomenon we're teaching in our agentic AI cohort: Everyone seems fixated on the models, but I think there's so much low-hanging fruit in the control layer above the model. "Agent" and "harness" sell that layer short. There's so much more that we can do beyond "read input, send to model, run commands it returns." He's right. The model is a brain in a jar. Useful, fast, occasionally wrong, stateless. Everything that turns it into a produc...