3 minutes
Harness: The Mean Time to Response Advantage
Imagine you are a Vibe Coder. You have never written a line of code yourself — you have only used AI agents to build things. They manage your deployments, and they handle all of your code management when you ask them to refactor the codebase.
Now imagine you succeed in this role. You learn how to get agents to build large swaths of a codebase, and through that process you start to understand the engineering concepts and architecture behind it. You become very successful. Now imagine the mean response time of getting answers from your agents — the experience of asking a question and having it resolved almost immediately.
Eventually, this individual has to work with a company to handle integrations, because the quality of their work and the business built around it keep growing. They start to make a footprint, and this large corporation offers them opportunities that give them a competitive advantage. It’s a good deal, and it makes sense that this would happen as the company this Vibe Coder started matures.
Now imagine dealing with that company. It moves far slower than the agents this Vibe Coder talks to every day. Communication channels like email or Slack become hard to manage for the company on the other side of the deal — messages get lost, and it’s hard to find the threads that highlight open concerns still awaiting a response.
That’s the opportunity: reducing the mean response time for people who are Vibe Coding. Rushing into a relationship with a slow response time causes a slow degradation of trust. If you can deliver the same service this large company does, but with greater customer satisfaction — because they haven’t adapted to the norms of new technology — that’s a real edge to grasp.
For instance, a company could simply hand over all its documentation in a zip file so agents can scan it. At a more advanced level, an AI agent could serve as the actual interface clients talk to — actively helping with onboarding, answering questions, and just being responsive. This is essentially giving an LLM access to a file system and letting it search that file system every time it’s asked a question. You don’t even need RAG — it’s not that difficult. You can build a personalized agent per team, with a plan per team. There can’t be that many documents each team needs for onboarding clients or managing client relationships.
Now imagine the opportunity you can capture just by providing better customer service — simply by building this solution and offering that simple service.