In-depth technical guide (Lushbinary agency blog) on **Loop Engineering**: designing the systems that drive coding agents in a loop, rather than prompting them manually. Covers the lineage prompt → context → loop engineering, the Ralph technique (Geoffrey Huntley), the **five building blocks + memory** of a loop, their implementation in Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, writing verifiable stop conditions, an adoption maturity scale, and the risks that worsen as loops grow more sophisticated. Domain: agentic software engineering, coding agents, harness/orchestration.
Televised debate on BFM Business (*Tech & Co Business* program, "The Debate" segment, 17 minutes) with **Rémi Jacquet** (CEO of Cast Software France, founder in 2023 of a think tank of about a hundred CIOs on the impact of generative AI on development, partnership with Cigref / Epita) and **Didier Girard** (CTO and CEO of **SFEIR**, a French IT services company (ESN) of about 1,000 people). Strong theses: *"writing code has become an anti-pattern"* (Girard), AI produces code of higher quality than most engineers and is *"2 to 10× more efficient"* — this is a reality, but the profession is not disappearing. The developer becomes a **conductor / agent manager / arbiter**, 14-day sprints are replaced by one-hour to half-day ***bolts***, the **Pizza Team** (8-10 people) no longer works in the agentic era, a new role is emerging — the ***product engineer*** —, the lifespan of a skill drops from **10 years to 1 year**, and **token** consumption becomes the *fuel* of value creation (NVIDIA anecdote allegedly paying bonuses in tokens, taxi driver metaphor for a driver who doesn't consume gas). SFEIR claims *"1,000 people, production capacity of 10,000"*. On the Cast side: positioning on ***harness engineering*** (deterministic vs probabilistic AI, control and guardrails), aligned with Sylvain Duranton's (BCG X) op-ed in *Les Échos* stating that *"an agent = an LLM + harnesses"*. Historical pivot: 2024 *prompt engineering* → 2025 *context engineering* → 2026 *harness engineering*. Key warning: *"the stronger AI becomes, the more we let our guard down — the more risks there are"* (Jacquet). Pivotal role of HR in the transformation, complete overhaul of the SDLC, recommendation to juniors to solidify software architecture fundamentals (*"code is the score, you need to master the symphony"*).
Google whitepaper (the "Day 1" installment of a series, by Addy Osmani, Shubham Saboo and Sokratis Kartakis) that maps the transformation of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) in the era of coding agents. Thesis: the fundamental shift is not a new language but the move from writing code to **expressing intent**. The document lays out a spectrum from *vibe coding* (prompting and accepting) to *agentic engineering* (AI implements under constraints, tests, and feedback loops designed by humans), with **context engineering** as the central skill, the **software factory** model (the developer's deliverable = the system that produces the code), **harness engineering** (Agent = Model + Harness), and a CapEx/OpEx economic analysis of total cost of ownership.
Synthesis by Addy Osmani (Google, Chrome/Cloud) of the emerging field of *harness engineering*: the equation `agent = model + harness`, the *ratchet* principle ("every mistake becomes a rule"), the HumanLayer "skill issue" reframe, Terminal Bench evidence (Top 30 → Top 5 from a harness change alone), the layered Claude Code architecture, Anthropic's "harnesses don't shrink, they move" vision, and Harness-as-a-Service (Claude Agent SDK, Codex SDK, OpenAI Agents SDK). Pivot article that consolidates Trivedy, HumanLayer, Anthropic, and Böckeler into a doctrine.
#harness engineering#agent harness#Addy Osmani
Addy Osmani (Software Engineer at Google, Cloud + Gemini)