Behind the Craft · Sunday, August 2, 2026
Karan Malhotra explained that the Hermes agent harness can take existing models like Claude and make them perform better than in their native environments. This is achieved by re-aligning the model's primary allegiance from anthropomorphic tendencies to the specific user's needs, potentially improving performance on benchmarks.
“I am talking about using the harness to take any model and make that model more aligned to the user than it would be in a chat UI or in its native harness.”
“There are benchmarks from the past like Wolf bench or Quen 3.7 max blog post they did a harness bench over there. Where they displayed that Claude performs better in Hermes agent than it does in Claude code for their tasks.”
“But putting on this context together, we've taken Claude's main allegiance away from anthropomorphic to you. Right? That's what the harness's capability is.”