Harness Engineering

Harness engineering designs the control system around an agent: what it may edit, how it receives feedback, where it writes state, how failures recover, and who can approve irreversible actions. The harness is the difference between a helpful agent session and an autonomous loop that can run for days without corrupting its objective.

When to Activate

Activate this skill when:

• Building autonomous research or experimentation loops
• Designing an agent environment with locked metrics and editable code or content
• Creating PR-producing or background agents
• Evaluating whether an agent can safely run without frequent human prompts
• Adding novelty, ablation, pruning, rollback, or durable logging to an agent workflow
• Preventing agents from gaming benchmarks, weakening rubrics, or losing state across compaction