Mike Chambers
Senior DevEx Engineer
AWS
The Harness Is the Agent
The Harness Is the Agent
The model gets the headlines, but the harness is what turns a model into an agent. In late 2026 the harness is where the real engineering, and the real differentiation, lives. This keynote covers why the harness matters now, both for the agents you use and the agents you build. It digs into what separates a performant harness from a toy loop: context handling, tool orchestration, latency, cost per task, reliability and observability. Then it shows real benchmark data from the open-source Strands harness. We'll look at how the new generation of agent-tuned models changes what a harness has to do, and close with a look to the future.
Mike Chambers
Mike Chambers is a Senior DevEx Engineer at AWS, where he helps developers build, ship and scale AI agents. He works at the point where models meet real software, focusing on harness engineering: the tooling, orchestration and patterns that turn a model into a dependable agent. Mike contributes to the open-source Strands Agents ecosystem, including Strands Labs projects such as Strands Decider, and speaks regularly at developer and AI conferences around the world. He has spent years teaching machine learning and generative AI to hundreds of thousands of learners through courses and live sessions. He's based in Brisbane, Australia, and builds things that are both production-ready and fun.