An agent harness wired up to a set of tools

Building an AI Agent from Scratch, Part 2: Tools, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hand the Model a Knife

In Part 1 we established the simple truth: LLMs can only produce text. The harness is the babysitter that turns that text into action. Today we build the action part. The tools. The hands. This is the fun chapter, by which I mean it’s the one where we voluntarily give a probabilistic text generator the ability to touch the filesystem and then act surprised when it tries to read /etc/passwd. All the code below is lifted straight from the repo — a single agent.py file you can clone and run. Strap in. ...

June 10, 2026 · 12 min · Ken Kitts
An agent harness wrapping a language model

Building an AI Agent from Scratch, Part 1: What Even Is an Agent Harness?

You’ve seen the demos. AI agents booking flights, writing code, querying databases, probably filing your taxes while whispering sycophantic flattery. Very impressive. Very “the future is here, and it’s kinda scary.” Here’s the simple secret nobody mentions in the keynote: LLMs can only produce text. That’s it. They can’t run code. They can’t check the time. They can’t read a file. They are the world’s most confident interns — full of opinions, zero ability to actually do anything. All they do is predict the next token and hope you’re impressed. ...

June 8, 2026 · 7 min · Ken Kitts