← Build postmortems

SoloAgent: finding the complexity around the model

A recap of the harness experiment: what shipped, where the complexity lived, and why building it made the abstractions clearer.

A recap of the 2026-03-03 build notes

This recap draws from the original SoloAgent build notes linked below.

What shipped

A local desktop harness with project-scoped chat, streaming responses, tool traces, terminal tabs and splits, Git visibility, and SQLite persistence. The aim was to understand a usable harness end to end, rather than to sell a product.

What proved difficult

The original writeup locates the complexity in state boundaries, tool-call presentation, terminal lifecycle, and Git operations under real user behavior. A working chat interface is only one part of that system.

Where AI fit

The model sits inside a larger execution environment. SoloAgent made context shaping, tool execution, history, and terminal integration explicit parts of the harness rather than treating the model as the whole application.

The takeaway

Building the surrounding runtime produced a clearer mental model than discussing harnesses in the abstract. The source does not report a specific next iteration; it records the implementation clarity gained from the experiment.