17/04/2026
Everyone's talking about better AI models.
We spent two and a half years learning that the model was never the hard part.
Building Ida — our AI Engineering Agent — the real engineering effort went into everything around the model. The constraints. The verification gates. The feedback loops. The physics-range enforcement that makes it impossible for Ida to output a mud weight no drilling engineer would ever accept.
That's harness engineering. And it turns out we were doing it before the term existed.
The model is the engine. The harness is the vehicle. And the teams shipping reliable AI are the ones who figured that out.
Full piece by Jie Cao on the Pions engineering blog 👇
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/harness-product-wearepions-jvmze