As someone who does loads of AI-driven dev and governance, I'm finding there are a lot of great nuggets here. Between him (chaos engineering) and Kent Beck (extreme programming) I'n a kid in the candy store and wanted to share.
The prose is definitely written by a Claude-like
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.
Broadly speaking,
- Copilot only reads AGENTS.md
- Codex reads AGENTS and CONTEXT
- Claude reads CLAUDE
This ai-literacy is noise, muddling the definitions and suggesting yet-another-md-file.
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)
And here is the original author on a podcast talking about it: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4FxEdjXldNhoh67KYVmbDu
I also have a self-evolving architecture on it, but you have to be careful, especially if you're using multiple models (still WIP).
The Harness is the Thing
No, the term does not come from Birgitta Boeckeler's article in martinfowler.com. It was coined by Mitchel Hashimoto months earlier in his 'My AI adoption journey' blog post [1], and immediately picked up by OpenAI [2] a week later.
luciandan•1h ago