A technical publication by Shubham Jindal
Not the LLM
The model is the center. The system is the product.
LLMs matter, but production AI is shaped by what surrounds the call: context retrieval, tool contracts, agent harnesses, runtimes, evals, observability, security, and governance.
- Securityidentity · permissions · guardrails
- Governancepolicy · audit · approvals
- Observabilitytraces · latency · cost
- Evalsquality · regressions · task success
- MCP + toolscapabilities · data · action
- Harnessplans · loops
- Context
raw capabilityLLMreasoning + generation
Runtimestate · queues · sandboxes · latency · cost · scale
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Agents
It's Not the LLM. It's the Harness.
Why the same model behaves like a different agent when context, tools, state, permissions, and control loops change around it.
MCP
It's Not the LLM. It's the MCP.
Why capable agents fail when their tool interfaces overwhelm context, and how small verbs plus registry dispatch change the architecture.