Harness Engineering: From Wire Bundles to AI Agents
Earlier this year, OpenAI shipped a production application at significant scale, and the team behind it didn’t write a single line of the application code. The model wrote it all. What the team did build was the scaffolding around the model: the system prompt, the tool definitions, the execution loop, the memory management, the verification checks, the guardrails. They called that scaffolding the harness. And the discipline of designing it, harness engineering, is quietly becoming the most important skill in AI agent development.
