Talk prep ask: how do you use (or think about) AI agent harnesses? Also migrating an orchestrator from bash to Elixir

Hi all

I’m presenting “Building a Harness for Fun and Profit” at Colorado Startup Week on September 14, 2026.

tl;dr - I built a harness that lets AI coding agents work together and am going to hold a workshop/demo for people who are interested in doing this on their own. It’s got Claude Code and Codex CLI pairing in adjacent tmux panes over a file-based message protocol, coordinated by a small Elixir daemon, with Gemini doing real-time OTel telemetry analysis in anotherr tmux window. The thesis of the talk is that the magic isn’t necessarily the model, it’s the harness: e.g. a file protocol, a small daemon, and tmux can beat clever prompting.

A couple of reasons I’m posting here:

1. The Elixir angle. I’m open-sourcing the stack before the talk and I’m migrating the orchestration layer (currently ~1,300 lines of bash driving multi-round agent collaboration) to Elixir. This includes stuff like task lifecycles as gen_statem, on-disk envelopes as the durable state, all side-by-side with the bash reference implementation. It’s early and honestly very experimental, but if OTP-shaped orchestration of AI agents sounds fun to you I’d love some eyes on it once it’s public and will have contributor-friendly issues ready.
2. The research ask (the main one). I want the talk to answer real questions and not just demo my setup. If you use agents in your workflow – or deliberately don’t – I’d love a short virtual call to chat about things like how do you coordinate agents today? What would make a harness worth adopting vs. building yourself (the build vs. buy debate)? What would you be skeptical of? What would you ask in the Q&A?

If you’re willing to chat, please send me a DM and I’ll send you a link to my Calendly. BTW I’m located in the US MT/Denver time zone.

I’ll happily share back a summary of what I learn and the repos when they land in this thread.

Thanks!