Harness Engineering
39 essays tagged with Harness Engineering.
Proof-Carrying Context: Why AI Agents Need More Than a Context Window
A research-grounded revision of context engineering: from relevant tokens to a replayable view of evidence, conflicts, omissions, and decision sufficiency.
The Harness Engineering Roadmap for 2026–27: From Agent Loops to Proof-Carrying Runtimes
A source-grounded 18-month roadmap for harness engineering across release manifests, portable trajectories, lifecycle security, skill evaluation, delegated authority, recovery, economics, and governed adaptation.
Skill Lift: How to Gate Agent Skills With Paired Live Evals
An implementation guide to evaluating agent skills as executable release artifacts using paired baselines, Skill Lift, ATIF trajectories, security checks, domain graders, and CI gates.
HarnessRisk in Practice: Turn the Agent Lifecycle Into a Security Test Matrix
A deep implementation guide to lifecycle security testing for agent harnesses: configuration, extensions, runtime, persistence, actions, recovery, evidence oracles, and release gates.
Harness Engineering in August 2026: The Control Plane Gets Measured
A source-backed state of the field on harness engineering: what shipped, what the newest research measured, what practitioners are debating, and the roadmap from agent loops to proof-carrying runtimes.
DeepSeek Harness: Everything Is a Plugin—Except Trust
A source-code critique of DeepSeek Harness and Cordis: why an everything-is-a-plugin runtime matters, where reversibility stops, and why self-evolution still needs an immutable control plane.
Agentic Recommender Systems: How Harness Engineering Changes Personalization
Recommenders are evolving from rankers into tool-using agents. Here is the hybrid architecture, evaluation harness, and rollout plan needed to build them safely.
The Production Harness Roadmap: Lessons from Claude Code, Copilot Studio, and Thea
A concrete 90-day roadmap for building a governed agent harness, derived from the latest Claude Code, Copilot Studio, Thea, Harness-IF, and A2E evidence.
Your Agent Followed the Rule—or Did It? Harness-IF and A2E Change Agent Evaluation
A deep implementation guide to rule-level, surface-aware, trajectory-based agent evaluation using the new Harness-IF and A2E research.
Harness Engineering: The Runtime Became the Product
A source-backed 10-day field report on Harness-IF, A2E, Thea, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and Claude Code—and what their combined evidence changes for agent engineering.
Agent Evaluation After the Leaderboard: The KDD 2026 Production Assurance Playbook
KDD 2026 shows why agent evaluation must cover protocols, trajectories, external state, evaluator operating profiles, causal rollout, and drift.
Agent Memory Should Be Compiled at Recall, Not Replayed From Storage
What MemHarness teaches us about reconstruction, negative transfer, source state, and compiling production agent memory against current evidence, policy, and authority.
Passive Awareness Is the Missing Multi-Agent Primitive—But It Needs a Control Plane
AgentRadio shows that agents improve when discoveries can cross lane boundaries during execution. Production teams should keep the asynchronous channel, then add typed evidence, bounded delivery, authority isolation, and replay.
What Production Agent Runtimes Actually Teach ContextOS: Twelve Laws of a Governed Harness
The strongest production agent runtimes converge on twelve architectural laws: compile context, persist state, separate authority from containment, make side effects resumable, treat approvals as typed interrupts, and promote learning only through evidence and replay.
Adaptive Agent Harnesses: Learn From Experience Without Letting Production Rewrite Itself
MemoHarness shows that execution experience can improve the control layer around an LLM. Production systems need a stricter pattern: adaptive performance inside an immutable safety envelope.
Agent Memory Is a Systems Workload: What SelfMem Changes—and What It Does Not
SelfMem improves long-horizon recall by letting an agent optimize its memory strategy. New systems and security research shows the production contract must also cover cost, freshness, provenance, and poisoning.
Your Agent Benchmark Is Measuring the Harness
Two new evaluation systems separate benchmark, harness, model, and environment. Their results show why one leaderboard score cannot tell you which agent to ship.
Agent Harness: An Architectural Framework for Production AI Agents
A whitepaper on typed contracts, policy gates, traces, verification loops, and release control for production AI agents.
Harness Improvement Loops Need Replayable Environments
Why harness improvement needs replayable episodes, bounded mutations, scorecards, source closure, and promotion gates.
Product Managers: How to Think About and Build Complex Agentic Systems
A practical PM guide to building agentic systems with workflow maps, intents, context packs, tools, records, evals, and rollout gates.
How to Develop an Agent with an Agent Harness, End to End
An end-to-end field guide for building agents as measurable harnesses: context, planning, tools, records, evals, rollout, and learning.
Autotune the Harness: Baking the Improvement Loop into ContextOS
How ContextOS treats autotune as a gated loop over traces, scorecards, replay sets, bounded candidates, approval, and rollout.
How Great AI Engineers Build Agents: Datasets, Scores, and Harnesses That Improve
Why strong AI engineers build datasets, scorecards, traces, and improvement loops instead of treating agents as prompts plus tools.
Harness Candidates Are Model Checkpoints: How to Improve Agents Without Silent Mutation
How to treat every prompt, retrieval, tool, policy, and evaluator change as a scored, reviewed, reversible harness candidate.
AGENTS.md Done Right: The Navigation File That Actually Helps Coding Agents
How to write AGENTS.md as a short, scoped, testable navigation file for coding agents instead of a bloated prompt dump.
The Agent Harness Audit: A Production Readiness Checklist for Governed AI Agents
A production readiness audit for agent harnesses: forty-four runtime controls grouped into eight evidence-backed outcomes.
Replay Harness in Code: Reproducing a DecisionRecord Byte-for-Byte
A TypeScript build-along for replay: input loading, hash-chain verification, canonical loop replay, and DecisionRecord diffing.
End-to-End Refund: How 12 Primitives Compose in One Production Run
A single refund run traced through 12 ContextOS primitives, from invokeAgent envelope to byte-equal replay.
Failure Playbooks: The Typed Verdict Map
How to replace generic retry loops with typed failure verdicts, compensations, escalation paths, and reversal-token checks.
Approval Gates in Code: The Destructive-Mode Handshake
A build-along for approval gates: frozen evidence, human signatures, gateway redemption, and replayable destructive-action handshakes.
Build the Tool Gateway: The Boundary That Actually Stops a Bad Action
A build-along for the Tool Gateway: adapter manifests, typed envelopes, resolver checks, dispatch, and destructive-action boundaries.
The Critic: verify, score, consolidate — in 80 Lines
A compact Critic implementation that verifies plans, scores outcomes, consolidates results, and records caveats.
Promotion-Aware Memory: Capture, Review, Promote, Recall in Code
A build-along for agent memory: capture, review, promote, recall, contradiction checks, and governed memory writes.
Build the Context Pack Compiler: Eight Stages, Eight Files
A build-along for the Context Pack compiler: eight deterministic stages that turn runtime inputs into a typed compiled context.
From Operator Correction to Released StrategyRule: The Improvement Loop, Coded
How one operator correction becomes a reviewed, replayed, versioned StrategyRule that prevents repeat agent failures.
Pack Rollout in Five Stages: Shipping a Context Pack Without Blowing Up Production
A five-stage rollout model for Context Packs: shadow, internal, low-risk, monitored expansion, full release, and rollback.
Wiring the Five Evaluators: Policy, Utility, Latency, Safety, Cost
A build-along for wiring policy, utility, latency, safety, and cost evaluators into a release-gated scorecard.
Building a Reliability Reviewer Agent: 70 Lines Past the Compliance One
How to extend the reviewer pattern for reliability: timeouts, retries, idempotency, fallback behavior, and rollback declarations.
Building a Compliance Reviewer Agent in 60 Lines and a Golden Set
How to build a compliance reviewer agent with a typed verdict envelope, rubric, golden set, and change-control queue.