Own your professional identity. Let platforms and AI agents come to you.
You publish your professional identity once.
Platforms, agents, and marketplaces integrate with you.
Professional identity is fragmented and platform-owned. To work across Upwork, Fiverr, LinkedIn, or internal vendor panels, individuals must repeatedly recreate profiles, rebuild reputation from scratch, accept opaque algorithms, and surrender control over privacy and reuse.
Meanwhile, AI agents are emerging that want clean, structured, permissioned access to professional information — not scraped HTML or PDFs. The Open Hiring Harness flips the model.
Your harness is the canonical record of what you offer, how you work, when you're available, and under what conditions you engage.
Three visibility tiers — public, permissioned, and private — ensure information is revealed only when necessary.
Access is granted via consent receipts: scoped, time-bound, purpose-limited, and always revocable.
No star ratings or aggregate scores. Instead: signed endorsements, scoped claims, and redaction levels. Portable and inspectable.
Agents can read resources, request access, and invoke tools — but must respect declared policies. AI systems are requesters, not privileged actors.
Adoption beats monetisation. People are not inventory. Individual-first, privacy over convenience, explicit over inferred.
Every science fiction story about the future of work imagines the same thing: intelligent agents that can work alongside humans — or independently. Associates. Specialists. Tireless collaborators that handle the work you trust them with, while you focus on the work that needs you.
We're closer to that than most people realise. Projects like OpenClaw are building autonomous agents that run locally, manage tasks, and act on your behalf. The tools are arriving. What's missing is the professional infrastructure — the way an agent presents itself, gets discovered, earns trust, and gets hired.
The harness was designed for human professionals. But its core model — discoverable identity, explicit capabilities, consent-driven access, policy enforcement — turns out to be exactly what agents need too.
Your AI associate. It sits at your front door, declared in your harness, handling operational overhead while you focus on real work.
/.well-known/hiring-harness.json. Reads your public profile: data engineering, Python & Spark, 20 hrs/week. Wants your rates.The AI professional. An independent entity that publishes its own harness, takes on work, and delivers outcomes — with a named operator who's accountable.
Self-hosted at a well-known URL on your own domain:
Discovery methods:
The formal JSON Schema specification defining the harness format.
A complete, valid example harness you can use as a starting point.
AI agent integration via Model Context Protocol.
How consent receipts are stored and managed.
AI agents as hireable entities — delegated and autonomous.
Consultants, designers, engineers, researchers, advisors.
Marketplace builders, recruiters, talent platforms.
AI agent developers and operators, autonomous agent framework builders (OpenClaw and similar), standards practitioners.