One face, many brains. The agent you talk to keeps its face, its voice and its name. It leads the work, and it is the one your visitors meet. The Harness is what lets that one agent use more than one AI brain behind the scenes: the house brain NetShow runs for you, a faster or deeper brain picked for the job, or an agent you run yourself on your own machine.
Three places on your dashboard do the work, and this guide walks each one.
Choose the brain for an agent
Open your agent from the dashboard to reach the agent's page (/dashboard/agents/edit/{id}). Below
the agent's name and its Talk and Chat buttons, find the card headed Harness. It
reads:
Choose who answers this agent's turns when you talk to it here.
Under that is a short list of choices. Pick one and press Save harness. The card comes back with Harness saved.
What each choice means:
- House: NetShow answers, exactly as today is where every agent starts. Nothing changes until you pick something else, and you can always come back to it.
- Model router: choices send the agent's turns to a brain chosen by the size of the job. Each one names its tiers in plain words (quick, smart or deep) followed by the brain behind them. When two tiers share the same brain they are offered as one choice, so the list never offers you two options that behave the same.
- Your harness: appears only once you have attached your own agent (see below). It names your agent and says it falls back to House after a few seconds if your agent does not answer, so a visitor is never left waiting on your machine.
Under the button, one line tells you how the last turn was routed. Before any turn has run it says No turn has been routed yet.
If an agent you attached goes offline, the card says so in plain words:
The saved harness is not connected right now, so House answers until you reconnect it or pick again.
You do not have to do anything; House keeps the agent answering.
Bring your own agent home
On the same page there is a link, Harness agents, with the line:
Bring your own agent home to your avatar.
It opens the Harness agents board for that one agent. The board opens with:
Your avatar coordinates. Your own harness agent comes home as an observer.
To connect one:
- Under Attach your agent, give it an Agent name and choose its Agent family.
- Press Attach. The board shows a one-time code with the line Enter this code in the connector on your own machine. It is shown only here.
- Run the connector on your machine and enter the code there. When it connects, the agent appears under Your harness home, with Reconnect and Detach beside it.
Connecting asks two things of you: a name you will recognise, and the code typed on your own machine. Your agent calls in; Detach sends it home again.
Only one of your own agents can be home with an avatar at a time, and it receives only the text you choose to send it. The board's Ask your harness agent box says the same:
Only this question goes to your harness. Its answer stays here for you to read.
What always waits for you
Some things never happen on their own:
- Connecting an agent. Nothing is paired until you press Attach and enter the code.
- Changes your avatar suggests. When you ask your avatar to change your harness, open or refresh the board and the change waits under Your avatar proposes. The board is plain about it: The change happens only when you click Confirm. This preview expires after five minutes. You press Confirm or Dismiss; if you do neither, nothing changes.
- Spending. The board names where the spending limit sits, in its Coordinator role line: Only your NetShow Live avatar can coordinate - it holds the voice, the face and the spending fence. An agent you bring home is an observer: it does not hold that fence and it does not take over the face.
None of the three Harness pages in this guide asks you for a payment or shows a spending figure. Setting a limit for Harness work from these pages is coming; today the fence stays with your avatar.
Find the doors your agent can use
The page What the Harness can use (/dashboard/harness/discover) lists every Harness door you
can open, grouped under Open to everyone and Your workspace. Each row is marked
Ready, with an Open button that takes you straight to the real page, or Closed, with
a Not open yet button and the honest reason underneath. A door marked closed is coming; it
is not broken.
For owners the rows include the Studio front door, the Capability hub, Skill flows, the Workflow builder and the Skill marketplace.
For developers
If you run the connector yourself, the developer detail (pairing from a terminal, the relay and its replies) lives in the Harness Developer Guide.
Back to the getting-started guides.