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METHODOLOGIE

Harness engineering

The building and tuning of the scaffolding around a language model that turns it into a working agent: tools, file access, execution environment, feedback loops, and safety checks. The harness — not the raw model — determines much of an agent's practical capability, making it a distinct engineering activity.

Origin

A practitioner term naming the tuning of an agent's harness as an engineering discipline distinct from training the model.

category
Engineering practice for building trust in coding agents
definition
Deterministic control layer, guardrails, structuring of information injected into the AI, and verification of produced code
dominant_period
2026

Related concepts

Fiches (4)