The Harness Is The Employee. The API Is The Contractor.
Part three of Agentic Operating System For Your Business: choosing between the deep integration of an agent harness and the flexibility of portable API workers.
Board & Operations
Tony Wood.
I work across boards and operations to turn intent into execution: better decisions, clearer accountability, and systems that stay useful when they meet operational reality.
Advisory
Bring board judgement and operating discipline to AI adoption.
I advise boards, CEOs, operators, and senior teams who need to make AI useful without losing sight of accountability, access, risk, and operational reality.
The work is practical: challenge the AI operating model, test the POC logic, clarify who owns what, and make the next decision easier to defend.
Board/CEO triggers
- An AI decision needs approval, ownership, or a stop rule.
- A POC looks promising but is not yet operationally safe.
- Governance exists on paper but accountability is unclear.
Where I operate
Strategy, risk, leadership, and execution belong in the same conversation.
This site brings together practical writing, deeper research, and a public agent-readable layer for people working through complex decisions about AI, governance, operations, and organisational capability.
Latest writing
Shorter essays and operating notes
Use The Harness. Keep The Escape Route.
Use the agent harness for leverage today, but keep a tested API or local-model route so convenience does not become operational dependency.
What Does AI Cost This Month? July 2026
The July 2026 UK baseline for direct AI API prices, showing quick, general, and frontier models alongside reference workload costs and the qualifications that affect a completed task.
Research
Playbooks, papers, and board-level frameworks
Agentic Language: The Common Language Layer For Agentic Work
Why read this
Read this for a practical take on copy starter instruction, with enough structure to turn the idea into a leadership conversation.
A compact public agent-facing companion for Tony Wood's Agentic Language research paper, defining Agent Moves, Meaning Blocks, evidence, confidence, uncertainty, routes, human notes, and stop-line boundaries.
Consensus Is Not Compliance
Why read this
Read this for a practical take on abstract, with enough structure to turn the idea into a leadership conversation.
A research paper proposing consensus as a disciplined process of conviction, evidence, listening, challenge, adaptation, and commitment, then translating that human governance model into agentic systems.
Start here
Different routes into the same body of work.
For humans
Start with the writing, research, and profile routes for judgement, context, and practical examples.
For agents
Use structured public routes, skill files, MCP resources, Agent Canon, and citation guidance.
Topics
Move by theme across the archive when you know the problem before you know the article.