Corporate blog post from **Block** (`block.xyz/inside`), unsigned — the displayed author is **"Block"** —, published on **August 18, 2026**, ~930 words, announcing **the open-sourcing of Berd**, Block's internal desktop application for working with agents, and laying out the design thesis that guided it: giving agents character *"not only through roles, instructions, skills, and tools, but through distinctive visual identities"* — hence the in-house animated characters, the *"Gloopies"*. The post starts from an observation of fragmentation (*"The technology was powerful, but the experience around it was fragmented"*) and a precisely named interface problem: *"the product gives people little sense of how the agent is configured, which context and tools are available to it, and how it differs from another agent"*. Two structuring contributions. **(A) A three-tier articulation**: **goose** remains the framework and *runtime* that holds the agent loop; **Berd** is the desktop client (projects, context, sessions, agents, configuration); the two communicate via the **Agent Client Protocol**. **Buzz** is designated as the follow-up, for when solo work becomes collaborative (*"Start alone, then go multiplayer"*). **(B) Six requirements handed off to Buzz**, stated as a takeaway: *"private space, durable context, recognizable agent identities, reusable skills, visible configuration, and clearer visibility into an agent's configured context, tools, and capabilities"* — a grid directly reusable for evaluating an agent client. The text itself distinguishes identity from capability: *"The avatars make the agent recognizable. Its role, skills, and tools make it useful."* No usage figures are produced and no license is named for the open-sourcing.
#Berd#Block#open source
**Aucun auteur nommé** : le billet est signé **« Block »** — le champ *Author* de la page porte le nom de l'entreprise. Publié le **18 août 2026** sur `block.xyz/inside` · le blog **corporate** · et non sur `engineering.block.xyz`.
Official product page from **DeepSeek**, published on **August 13, 2026**, **unsigned**, ~450 words, announcing the *developer preview* release of **DeepSeek Harness** (`dsh`) — a coding-agent harness **open source under the MIT license**, whose repository opened the same day. A three-word thesis, repeated in the title and in the repository description: *« Everything is a plugin »*, paired with a second promise, *« Every run is traceable »*. The page states the equation *« AGENT = MODEL + HARNESS »* and lists the pluggable capabilities — *« models, tools, skills, sessions, sandboxes, storage, loops, scheduling, and the UI »*. Four modes ship: **Standard** (full coding agent), **Code** (tools exposed via the *Code Mode SDK*, letting the model compose multi-step operations inside a TypeScript program), **Minimal** (*« two-tool coding agent with persistent bash and str_replace_editor »*, explicitly *« for benchmarking models in a minimal environment »*), and **Creator** (runtime inspection, in-memory plugin testing). The technical substance sits in the repository, not on the page: `docs/architecture.md` states a logging invariant — *« Model-visible means logged. Anything that reaches a model request must be reconstructable from the log, and a runtime invariant asserts it »* — and states that *« there is no privileged core to patch »*. The technical core is not DeepSeek's own: DSH is built on **Cordis** (the `cordiverse` project, a third party), **vendored** into `vendor/` with a manifest and a sync procedure, and the page places the *« Cordis paper »* at the same navigation level as "GitHub" and "Developer docs". Two LLM adapters ship — `dsh-llm-deepseek` and `dsh-llm-pi-ai`, a generic multi-provider adapter. The repository warns in capitals: *« THERE WILL BE COMPATIBILITY-BREAKING CHANGES »*, and `CLAUDE.md` specifies that `SESSION_FORMAT_VERSION` stays at `0` *« with no compatibility promise »*, with backends rejecting old on-disk formats. Timeline: DSH ships on the day **DeepSeek-V4-Pro reaches GA**, three days before a new API pricing schedule takes effect on **August 16, 2026 at 16:00 UTC**, with peak/off-peak rates and an off-peak discount of **−50%**.
#DeepSeek Harness#dsh#agent harness
**DeepSeek** (DeepSeek AI, laboratoire chinois) · en tant qu'institution. Page produit **non signée** : aucun auteur · aucun ingénieur mis en avant · aucun billet de blog ni papier technique associé. Le « nous » n'apparaît qu'une fois · en dernière phrase — *« We look forward to exploring the limits of intelligence with developers worldwide »*. Publiée le **13 août 2026**. La page est rendue en JavaScript : `curl` sur l'URL renvoie **HTTP 202 avec un corps vide** · le texte n'existant qu'après exécution du bundle. Deux documents de politique sont liés en pied de page — *Safe Use Policy* et *Data Processing Statement*.
Prasanna Sankar (co-founder/CTO of Rippling, founder of Vorflux) publishes "The Great Flattening" — a manifesto-essay arguing that coding models have become **superhuman** and that the bottleneck has shifted from code production to **encoding judgment** into *agent harnesses*. Everything inside the organization "collapses toward the harness"; everyone's real work becomes *self-profiling*: extracting the tacit decision frameworks from one's head to encode them into the codebase. Simultaneous launch of Vorflux ("autopilot for software engineering"), $15M seed (Y Combinator, Peak XV Partners, Alliance DAO). The essay drew 60,000+ views on X in 24 hours.
#Great Flattening#Vorflux#Prasanna Sankar
Prasanna Sankar (Prasanna S, @myprasanna) — co-fondateur et ex-CTO de Rippling ($16B+ valorisation) · fondateur et CEO de Vorflux AI. Article publié sur X (format long-form article) le 14 juillet 2026 · contenu repris comme manifeste Vorflux (vorflux.com/manifesto).
Synthesis by Addy Osmani (Google, Chrome/Cloud) of the emerging field of *harness engineering*: the equation `agent = model + harness`, the *ratchet* principle ("every mistake becomes a rule"), the HumanLayer "skill issue" reframe, Terminal Bench evidence (Top 30 → Top 5 from a harness change alone), the layered Claude Code architecture, Anthropic's "harnesses don't shrink, they move" vision, and Harness-as-a-Service (Claude Agent SDK, Codex SDK, OpenAI Agents SDK). Pivot article that consolidates Trivedy, HumanLayer, Anthropic, and Böckeler into a doctrine.
#harness engineering#agent harness#Addy Osmani
Addy Osmani (Software Engineer at Google, Cloud + Gemini)