Harness, Scaffold, and the AI Agent Terms Worth Getting Right
When a field evolves quickly, its vocabulary often evolves faster than its shared understanding. Terms start to blur, get reused in different contexts, or become shorthand for ideas that are never fully explained. We are currently seeing this happen in the field of AI Agents, where concepts are getting mixed together, some are renamed, and others are widely used for a few months before quietly disappearing.
This can be overwhelming for newcomers, and even for practitioners trying to keep up with the latest developments. After ICLR 2026, one of us (@ariG23498) posted a question that captured this confusion well:
“What do you mean by the terms ‘harness’ and ‘scaffold’ in the context of agents? I have heard a lot of explanations while I was at ICLR, but I could not understand why they did not converge to