Methodology: Harness Engineering and Scaling the IRify R&D Practice
In 2026, large-model capabilities are widely seen as having entered a plateau: the brute-force aesthetics of simply piling on more compute now yields sharply diminishing marginal returns, and high-quality human training corpora are nearing exhaustion. Confronted with this bottleneck, the industry's focus has begun to shift. There is a growing consensus that the era of competing purely on models is fading, and an era of competing on Harness Engineering has arrived. It is much like building a car: once you have squeezed the engine's horsepower to its physical limit, further gains in overall vehicle performance can no longer come from staring only at the engine — your attention must turn to the systems that actually harness that engine, such as the drivetrain and the steering wheel.

