Harness

I recently took part in the International Technology Congress. At our “Digital Transformation: The Success Triad — Technology, Security and People” session, someone observed that technology is advancing so rapidly that it can be difficult to keep track of the changes. I suggested that we should meet more often and share experience.

As if to prove the point, another community, “ya-IT-y”, recently held a round table as part of its “Code with AI” stream, where members shared their knowledge and observations.

First, Nikolay Khokhlov spoke about building his own AI agent from scratch. He used Hermes, an open-source harness. The hardest stage was the initial installation and launch. Nikolay carried out the subsequent Hermes configuration steps with Hermes itself. The possible ways to use an AI agent are limited only by the user’s imagination. Nikolay shared the tasks for which he already uses Hermes and his ideas for developing the agent further.

Next was Vyacheslav Likhobabin. He spoke about how his team uses the task-management tool Backlog.md. Vyacheslav made a point shared by all the round-table participants: the development of AI models leads to overengineering — creating an unnecessarily complex product that brings no additional benefit and only costs time and money.

Vyacheslav was followed by Ivan Shchedrin, who showed how he uses skills and MCP connections to various services in his company to delegate complex tasks to his AI agent. Ivan shared his experience of organising MCP tools so that the agent does not overflow its context and simply get confused by the available capabilities.

After the presentations, a lively discussion began, with round-table participants sharing their problems and how they had addressed them.

To my surprise, I discovered an advantage of belonging to several communities at once. It turned out that a problem we had solved in the Digital Leaders of Business Club is very acute for many members of the “ya-IT-y” community of IT managers. Naturally, I shared the solution.

I am convinced that, given the industry’s current rapid development, regular experience-sharing among pioneers is an effective way to keep one’s knowledge at the frontier of progress.