A harness is a consented, verifiable clone of how one specific person thinks. Nobody has built a perfect one yet. We intend to.
A weekend project can wrap a system prompt in someone's name and call it a clone. It sounds right up until a customer asks something the real person never actually answered. Then it guesses, confidently, in their voice. That's a liability wearing a costume.
Recordings, transcripts, notes, decisions. The whole body of work, not a two-line bio.
The harness says "I don't have material on that" instead of guessing in someone's voice.
The source person approves what's included and stays in the loop as it evolves.
Swap the model underneath and the judgment carries over. No vendor lock-in.
Five stages sit between a real person and a harness worth trusting. Skip one and you've built a costume.
Everything that shows how someone actually thinks: recordings, transcripts, notes, past decisions and the reasoning behind them. The corpus already exists in the tools a company runs: Gong and Outreach calls, Zoom recordings, Notion pages, Google Drive docs, CRM history. Nobody sits for interviews. The harness is built from what is already there.
Tone, vocabulary, what they emphasize, and the route they take to an answer, not just the answer itself. The reasoning pattern is the real asset. We extract it and make it reusable.
Some harnesses should sound like the person. Others only need to think like them. Sounding like them is a separate step, and always opt-in.
The stage most clones skip. A harness has to know what it doesn't know, and say so, instead of guessing in someone else's voice. Trust lives or dies right here.
The real person stays in the loop. They approve what goes in, revise it as their thinking changes, and get accounted for when the harness is used beyond their own audience.
The rep who always knows which objection to handle first. Cloned the right way, their approach becomes something the whole team can learn from, not a black box that replaces them.
Thirty years of judgment walks out the door on someone's last day. A harness built with their consent before they go keeps that judgment in the building: askable, sourced, and honest about what it never covered. The retiree stays in the loop, and gets accounted for when it's used.
The first person most leaders want to clone is themselves. A personal harness answers the questions you've already answered, drafts the way you actually draft, and hands anything genuinely new back to you. You are both the source and the reviewer, so consent is built in. The pipeline's discipline is what keeps it honestly you.
If your team's best thinking is stuck in one head, or your most experienced person is close to their last day, get in early.
Request early access