Building a full agentic harness around a 4B model is hard
Around 3 months ago, we were thinking why none of the iPhone apps running an LLM are built as a full harness (as in inference + agentic loop + context management + tools + MCP servers and etc.). It became more interesting when we noticed even the new Siri is not fully on device (and not available in EU for that matter). Having built a few agentic products around a custom harness in the past, we thought this shouldn't be that hard. well, we underestimated how "dumb" a 4B model can be, especially when it comes to tool calling. :D We tried 8 different models and we settled on Qwen 3.5 4B and we…
Building a full agentic harness around a 4B model is hard launched on August 19, 2026 with 5 votes, #1,809 of 23,274 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
What it does
Orvena is a complete assistant that runs on your phone. It moves meetings, finds places, reads photos, and talks in a natural voice in 31 languages. No account. No Orvena server.
Orvena moves meetings, looks things up on the schedule you set, finds places nearby, reads the photo you attach, and talks with you in a natural voice, in 31 languages. The language model runs on your phone. No account. No Orvena server. There are apps that run a language model on your phone, and apps that give it a few tools . Orvena works with the phone you already have: calendar, reminders, alarms, maps, photos, health, music, files. Every action leaves a receipt you can read, and anything consequential asks before it runs. Ask tonight, and Orvena checks at the right time. If the app is open, it simply runs. If the phone is in your pocket, a notification arrives; one tap sets it working,…from orvena.app
In the maker’s words, at launch
Around 3 months ago, we were thinking why none of the iPhone apps running an LLM are built as a full harness (as in inference + agentic loop + context management + tools + MCP servers and etc.). It became more interesting when we noticed even the new Siri is not fully on device (and not available in EU for that…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- IBI built an on-device LLM based chatbot for iPhones2023 · ▲20
I’ve been playing around with local LLMs for the past couple of months and decided to build something that can run on an iPhone. It’s a universal app built with SwiftUI and the excellent ggml library. The model is an SFT fine tuned and 4 bit quantised version of the RedPajama-INCITE-Chat-3B-v1 OSS LLM. It works reasonably well on recent-ish (~3 year old) iPhones, iPads and Macs. It was launched on the App Store yesterday[1] and Product Hunt today[2]. It seems to be reasonably ok at natural language interactions, but given its size, does pretty badly at coding and reasoning. Also, it…
Harness by Autonomous8d ago · autonomous.ai · ▲294Every coding agent, every machine, one command center.
ViberiaMay 2026 · getviberia.com · ▲146Hey HN, This is my take on the agent harness. Everything on an isometric map. Agents are grouped into "buildings" that run in a sequence or a loop; e.g., the CodeForge has an agent that writes a PRD, another one that implements, and a third that reviews. Everything is customizable, you build your own buildings/teams however you want. It's a Tauri app, really light (about 8x less energy than the closest competitor I benchmarked, so it actually runs from a coffee shop on battery). It's macOS only for now, but ping me if you are willing to test the Windows or Linux version. I've been…
SwiftAI – open-source library to easily build LLM features on iOS/macOS2025 · github.com · ▲74We built SwiftAI, an open-source Swift library that lets you use Apple’s on-device LLMs when available (Apple opened access in June), and fall back to a cloud model when they aren’t available — all without duplicating code. SwiftAI gives you: - A single, model-agnostic API - An agent/tool loop - Strongly-typed structured outputs - Optional chat state Backstory: We started experimenting with Apple’s local models because they’re free (no API calls), private, and work offline. The problem: not all devices support them (older iPhones, Apple Intelligence disabled, low battery, etc.). That…
I built an open source multi-agent harness in GoApr 2026 · github.com · ▲6Hey HN. I built an AI agent harness over the past few months and I'm open sourcing it today. Some context on why. I've been building with Claude Code daily using this harness. It orchestrates multiple AI agents as a team, with a dashboard, chat, kanban board, the works. I used it to build a full SaaS product (MyUpMonitor, https://myupmonitor.com) in about 24 hours of focused coding. Then yesterday Anthropic announced Mythos and decided to keep it behind closed doors. Meanwhile I'm paying for Claude and I can't access their best model. I don't think that is nice at all... So I'm…
- TFThe fastest way to run Mixtral 8x7B on Apple Silicon Macs2024 · ▲18
I’d originally launched my app: Private LLM[1][2] on HN around 10 months ago, with a single RedPajama Chat 3B model. The app has come a long way since then. About a month ago, I added support for 4-bit OmniQuant quantized Mixtral 8x7B Instruct model, and it seems to outperform Q4 models at inference speed and Q8 models at text generation quality, while consuming only about 24GB of RAM[3] at 8k context length. The trick is: a) to use a better quantization algorithm and b) to use unquantized embeddings and the MoE gates (the overhead is quite small). Other notable features include many more…
More ai this month
the category →
Paintings by AI models: programs run through a simulation of oil paint.
AI · 21d ago · stillwet.art
PixVerse R2▲381A real-time world model you can explore and change
AI · 30d ago · world.pixverse.video
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, August 2026
the whole month →- TL
Life & fun · Aug 2026 · louisabraham.github.io
Clipto MCP▲655Hey HN, We recently built Clipto. It’s a tool that lets you search over terabytes of video, audio, and images on your computer, without relying on the cloud. Motivation: we probably all had this similar experience, we know a moment exists in a video or audio, but finding it takes hours scrubbing the timeline. You can send all the media to process in the cloud, but it’s slow, expensive and raises privacy concerns. So we decided to build our own on-device media search engine. How it works (high level): 1. We ingest video, audio, image; normalize formats via ffmpeg; run content analysis to…
Work · Aug 2026 · clipto.com
Hello HN! I found that picking out plausible but diverse skin tones for my digital art and game development projects was kind of difficult, and I got curious about if there was a way to define a color space that made it easy. I've built a color picker and procedural generation algorithm based on the space as well as a bunch of other fun js features and demos throughout the page that use the equations. If you find it interesting, I have lots of explanations of how I built it and what properties the space has. The methodology might be a bit shaky, but hopefully the result is as helpful for…
Life & fun · Aug 2026 · toneyalexander.github.io
Astute▲606Automate your B2B brand going viral, with new media creators
AI · Aug 2026 · company-app.joinastute.com