janyl

A line drawing of an empty conductor’s rostrum with the baton set down on the music stand beside an open score. Around it the orchestra’s chairs stand empty in a semicircle, each with its instrument resting against it or lying across the seat: violins, a cello, a double bass, horns, a timpani. Drawn in a uniform stroke with no fill and no shading.

Harnessing AI

A harness takes multi-turn AI responses and turns them into something actionable, like creating a flow chart or ordering dinner for a team. The world’s most popular open-source harness, Openclaw, has rapidly stabilized over the past year and is now at a 2.0 release with strong coding and multiplayer chat capabilities. The world’s leading commercial harness, Claude Code, crossed the USD 1b revenue mark in less than a year thanks to its strong code writing and system administration abilities.

All janyl agents are harness-agnostic, meaning they are designed to be hatched from any harness. That is because, as janyl agents become more powerful, the harnesses used to build them do less and less work, and some disappear entirely.

janyl agents are “hatched” from text documents only. A harness reads the text documents, understands the agent it needs to build, and builds an initial version of it with very limited capabilities. At this point, the majority of significant interactions are still offloaded to the base harness. For example, when someone asks the agent for last quarter’s supplier list, it is the harness that reads the question, finds the file on the shared drive and writes the reply, while the agent supplies only the instructions saying where to look and what it is allowed to touch.

As time goes on and more actions are turned into code or API calls to LLMs, the original harness is used less and less. As an example, a task that starts as the agent reading every message in the accounts inbox one at a time to work out which invoices are late will, over time, turn into a few lines of code that ask the accounting system the same question directly, with the model called only for the handful of cases that need a judgment.

At final maturity, janyl agents use harnesses for a limited set of interactions such as holding an open conversation with a person, making sense of a document they have never seen before, and writing themselves new code when the business changes. In some cases, the harness disappears entirely and is superceded entirely by direct API calls to an LLM like Claude or GPT.

This process is inspired, like much of AI, by biology. It’s why we use words like “hatch” and “grow”. But the analogy goes deeper: the yolk sac feeds an embryo and is drawn in and used up before the animal ever feeds itself, a tadpole’s tail is reabsorbed as its legs grow, and a seedling lives off its cotyledons until it has leaves of its own. Many industrial processes also take this form: the wax model is melted out of the mold before the bronze is poured, the timber centering under an arch is struck once the keystone is in...

Perhaps our favorite analogy for this process comes from music. Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov is quoted as having said “I will speak, and you will listen. Then I will speak less, and you will start to work. And finally I will not speak at all, and you will work.” Our agents work the same way. They slowly start to work, and by the end, their harness hardly speaks, letting the agent orchestrate the daily symphony that is your business.

  • OpenClaw, openclaw/openclaw. Repository created 24 November 2025; 388,693 stars, read 3 September 2026. The project spells its own name OpenClaw.
  • OpenClaw, OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally, 30 August 2026, and the release notes at v2026.8.1 (AKA OpenClaw 2.0). The project versions by date; 2.0 is its name for this release, not a git tag.
  • OpenClaw, Multi-user mode, and the 2.0 post above for shared sessions, which is where “multiplayer” is the project’s own word.
  • Anthropic, Anthropic acquires Bun as Claude Code reaches $1B milestone, December 2025. Generally available May 2025; “six months after becoming available to the public, it reached $1 billion in run-rate revenue”.
  • Anthropic, Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code, 24 February 2025, for the start of the clock.
  • Nikolai Malko, Vospominaniia. Stat’i. Pis’ma [Reminiscences. Articles. Letters], Leningrad, 1972, page 49. Malko studied under Rimsky-Korsakov at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory and is recalling the opening of a term.
  • Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Wikipedia, Students. Featured Article; the quotation and its citation to Malko have stood in it since 2 March 2008.