Anyways, I really appreciate you created the post. It’s pretty amazing that a project from a self-taught developer like me, who started in 2024, got so much attention.
What always came to mind for me is an “engine wiring harness”. It’s responsible for getting power and data to all the right places without having to manually route cables around the engine / car.
If you google an image of it, maybe it’ll make sense
As already mentioned, this is the noun use but also different connotations.
To my thinking, to orchestrate or steer suggests a conductor or driver, an outside entity providing direction. A master agent creating and directing subagents could reasonably be called an orchestrator.
A harness is what the horse wears to pull a cart, or what connects a pilot to a parachute and provides the controls to tug on and steer. It might provide guidance or capability, but not active direction. It's also a fairly common use in hardware ( a wire harness) and software (a testing harness) already.
Well, "Orchestrate" and "Steer" are verbs, while "Harness" is a noun. You need a noun here, not a verb, because the harness is not actively doing anything, it's just a set of constraints and a toolset.
Haha. Nobody ever cared that some humans preferred to use services via a CLI versus GUI. But now that "AI" needs it, CLI programs and APIs get released left and right :D
It’s not that nobody cared, it’s that the cost of building and maintaining CLIs, relative to the usage they got, often didn’t make economic sense. In fact, this is the first time I’ve seen someone want to use Slack via a CLI, not a TUI, an actual CLI. APIs, on the other hand, had plenty of real usage and made business sense, so most services offered them.
With AI, two things have changed: (1) the cost of building a CLI on top of a documented API has dropped a lot, and (2) there’s a belief that “designed for agents” CLIs will enable new kinds of usage that weren’t practical before and that will move the needle on the bottom line.
And now, since bloated agent harnesses like Claude Code are the hot thing, AI promoters are calling MCP obsolete! (No need for HN's summer 2025 fad. Just write CLI tools!)
I wish someone commanded their agent to write a Python "compiler" targeting WASM. I'm quite surprised there is still no such thing at this day and age...
Oh, so you are looking for a real compiler. I do not think that it is possible to compile Python, since the language is just too dynamic.
You'd have to compile every function for every possible combination of types, since the types of the function arguments can not be known at compile time without solving the halting problem. Even worse, new types could be created at runtime.
You can either type everything (like Cython, which arguably is not really Python anymore) or include a compiler to compile types that were not known at compile time, but that is just a JIT compiler with extra steps.
Nutika uses CPython as fallback. From the Limitations section:
> Standalone binaries built using the --standalone command line option include an embedded CPython interpreter to handle aspects of the language that are not determined when the program is compiled and must be interpreted at runtime, such as duck typing, exception handling, and dynamic code execution (the eval function and exec function or statement), along with those Python and native libraries that are needed for execution, leading to rather large file sizes.
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