Harness Engineering

luciandan

I like how agent review is a deprecation target. explicitly. Se then a harness matures by getting dumber and cheaper, not smarter.

esafak

What even is this "AI Literacy framework"? When I see such overengineering I look at what the author has done. In this case, I find the author runs a consultancy on engineering "Habitats for Humans and AI" ( https://www.russmiles.com/ ), listing a bunch of books he did not write (the author names are conveniently cropped out). This doesn't even belong on LinkedIn.

lacoolj

Not saying this is AI-gen but it's very dense and doesn't read like something I could glean info from easily

iTokio

It’s fascinating to live through a the emergence of a new technology and to see people trying to make sense of it as they go. I personally think that a lot of the words used around AI, harness, SKILLS, agents, RAG.. are make up words or close to it, words that do not have profound semantics, even though people are trying to, often after the fact, make sense of them. It’s just popular words that are different enough that people like to use them to claim a new knowledge, or to market a product. But we could use AI tooling instead of harness in the abstract, and it would be better to use more precise terms for more concrete use cases, agent loop, CLI, IDE.. It was a fun game at a time where papers were competing for attention , but now that it has become a proven technology, I hope we can find more precise and meaningful words.

davedx

This part seems relevant - they make explicit the difference between their HARNESS.md document and AGENTS.md. It's actually interesting: https://habitat-thinking.github.io/ai-literacy-superpowers/p...

wrinkl3

"Explain the harness" is apparently the new "explain LLMs" genre of slop blogging, I now see articles to this effect on HN daily.

tosh

it lists 'Garbage Collection' as one of the 3 components of a harness I don't know any harness that solves 'Garbage Collection' in the way described here (most harnesses accelerate context pollution and code base drift via instructions they embed into system prompts, tool descriptions and skills)

siavosh

What’s the best current practice if we want to enable agent code review and approval of GitHub PRs but only for specific users?

gardnr

Here’s the original article this one is based on: https://martinfowler.com/articles/harness-engineering.html And here is the original author on a podcast talking about it: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4FxEdjXldNhoh67KYVmbDu

samuell

I also stumbled upon this site, which on a first glance looks really thorough. Interested to hear if folks have comments on it though: https://walkinglabs.github.io/learn-harness-engineering/en/

issacnitin

This is perfect, here's a tool for harness engineering to be more effective that I just released today https://github.com/issacnitin/RealDiff

hnd9q09qk4

This is oddly reassuring

ChrisArchitect

Related currently: The Harness is the Thing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49452346

ricardobeat

The term harness engineering does not come from Birgitta Boeckeler's article in martinfowler.com. It was first used by Mitchel Hashimoto months earlier in his 'My AI adoption journey' blog post [1], and immediately picked up by OpenAI [2] a week later. Also worth noting that this text is not only entirely AI generated, but meant for other agents to read , not us humans. [1] https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey [2] https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/

Nicholas_C

Is Harness Engineering the new Prompt Engineering?

ChaseRensberger

definitely a little bit of shameless self promotion but I write about a lot of common harness concepts in the docs of Wingman ( https://wingman.actor ) - a client agnostic agent harness I've been working on for a while: https://docs.wingman.actor/concepts/sessions/ I think there is still plenty of innovation to be had in the space. Right now everything is still pretty bundled to the file system where getting skills and things to work inside of like a virtual worker requires simulating a virtual file system (usually). I believe even in the latest opencode v2 versions it still requires that a session be bundled to a working directory, I try to avoid (some of) that in Wingman.