$ grep -r "series:harness" · 2 posts

Into the Harness

Design, scars, and methodology of agent harnesses

  1. Auto-Compact Ate My Constraints: A Post-Mortem

    I told the agent "don't touch module X" at the start of the task. Two hours in, it modified X — the constraint had been eaten by context compression. The mechanism-level root cause, and three fixes you can copy: externalized specs, discriminating compression, post-compact self-checks.

    [series:Into the Harness] [read:5min] #context-engineering#post-mortem#Claude Code

  2. Model + Harness = Agent: The Gap Isn't Where You Think

    Put the same model into Claude Code and into a bare ReAct loop and usability differs by an order of magnitude — the entire difference is harness. Here are the six jobs a harness does, and why it's the real battleground of agent products.

    [series:Into the Harness] [read:4min] #agents#harness#methodology