Understanding Harnesses, A Question

I have a few questions to see if I've understood what harnesses are and what they do, and the roles of LLMs and other tools. When people say "I work with an AI", in general that just the whole field. When you get more specific, its that you have a collection of instructions, markdown files, databases and control mechanisms and thru that 'harness' various "AIs" are assigned parts of what ever I'm working on.

I don't want my data and experience tied up behind a single provider, like many. I've looked at the equipment to host a LLM offline, and it seems stiff. Out of my budget.

Here's the question, do we actually need the LLM offline? Or are we just going to need to maintain ownership of the harness components? If my orchestrater agent needs the research for a 1000 word summary I request, and calls my Chatgpt subscription for the searches, won't all the chat info stay on my machine?

I almost have my mind around it, I think. What am I misunderstanding?

7 comments