> A decent model with a great harness beats a great model with a bad harness.

Agreed. I don't use off the shelf skills and such. I craft my own that best serve the abstract problem rather than act as generic code tools.

If I am working on a game I don't want a bunch of generic language tools and skills, I want game engine specific, Vulkan specific constraints, GPU pipeline specific context that are whittled down themselves to fit the entity data model of the specific game

Gemma 4 and Qwen3.6 then crank out banger results after Gemini plans and architecture are handed to them (I scrape the AI Studio log from Gdrive rather than use the Gemini APIs)

I quit using RAG and MCP build out the harness without them.

Imo RAG and MCP were same old software industry effort of conjuring endless general purpose software things to discuss at the expense of doing a good job within reasonable constraints