Cognitive Harnesses: How to Make AI Smarter Than the Labs in Your Niche

What if I told you that you and I could get better results from AI than the software engineers working in the labs that made it?

They have the data, the talent, the compute. Shouldn’t they win hands-down?

I believe that there’s a massive, underexploited opportunity to make AI smarter than the labs inside your own niche.

And you don’t do it by fine-tuning AI, which is expensive and time-consuming (and out of reach for most of us). Instead, you beat the labs by building on top of what they’ve already built.

The evidence for this opportunity is mounting.

For example, a six-person team called Poetiq took Gemini 3 Pro, wrapped it in what they call a “cognitive harness,” and beat Gemini’s own flagship reasoning model on ARC-AGI 2 at half the cost.

Poetiq isn’t alone. In today’s session, I share several case studies and evidence from 10+ studies.

Today, they demonstrate that mental models, paradigms, heuristics, and other t…

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