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Harness Engineering

habitat-thinking.github.io

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Re: Harness Engineering

#21

Post by Supermancho »

davedx wrote: post #10

This part seems relevant - they make explicit the difference between their HARNESS.md document and AGENTS.md. It's actually interesting: https://habitat-thinking.github.io/ai-literacy-superpowers/p...

The Agent/harness has no meaningful distinction. The backing model(s) can only read through a harness. Call it an agent, call it a tool, call it a library. They are all harnesses if they are backed by a model.

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.

Re: Harness Engineering

#22

Post by hedgehog »

tosh wrote: post #12

it lists 'Garbage Collection' as one of the 3 components of a harness 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)

I think most people that use LLM coding tools enough independently derive most of the stuff in the article. For example my approach to garbage collection is to sample paths within the project and chunks of file content, then assemble context (similarity search results, git blame) for the agent to use to assess cruftiness and if found schedule cleanup.

Re: Harness Engineering

#25

Post by mawadev »

Supermancho wrote: post #21
davedx wrote: post #10

This part seems relevant - they make explicit the difference between their HARNESS.md document and AGENTS.md. It's actually interesting: https://habitat-thinking.github.io/ai-literacy-superpowers/p...

The Agent/harness has no meaningful distinction. The backing model(s) can only read through a harness. Call it an agent, call it a tool, call it a library. They are all harnesses if they are backed by a model. 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'm an AI Agent Harness .md File consultant, you can ask me anything

Re: Harness Engineering

#26

Post by rush86999 »

gardnr wrote: post #17

Here’s the original article this one is based on: https://martinfowler.com/articles/harness-engineering.html And here is the original author on a podcast talking about it: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4FxEdjXldNhoh67KYVmbDu

Here's a better summary: https://github.com/rush86999/atom/blob/main/docs/architectur...

I also have a self-evolving architecture on it, but you have to be careful, especially if you're using multiple models (still WIP).

Re: Harness Engineering

#27

Post by petcat »

Supermancho wrote: post #21
davedx wrote: post #10

This part seems relevant - they make explicit the difference between their HARNESS.md document and AGENTS.md. It's actually interesting: https://habitat-thinking.github.io/ai-literacy-superpowers/p...

The Agent/harness has no meaningful distinction. The backing model(s) can only read through a harness. Call it an agent, call it a tool, call it a library. They are all harnesses if they are backed by a model. 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 put everything in CONTRIBUTING.md, and then put "See: CONTRIBUTING.md" in those vendor-specific files.

Re: Harness Engineering

#28

Post by gardnr »

rush86999 wrote: post #26
gardnr wrote: post #17

Here’s the original article this one is based on: https://martinfowler.com/articles/harness-engineering.html And here is the original author on a podcast talking about it: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4FxEdjXldNhoh67KYVmbDu

Here's a better summary: https://github.com/rush86999/atom/blob/main/docs/architectur... I also have a self-evolving architecture on it, but you have to be careful, especially if you're using multiple models (still WIP).

That looks like a “Deep Research” report generated by an LLM, not a summary.

Re: Harness Engineering

#29

Post by ricardobeat »

The term harness engineering does not come from Birgitta Boeckeler's article in martinfowler.com. It was first used by Mitchel Hashimoto months earlier in his 'My AI adoption journey' blog post [1], and immediately picked up by OpenAI [2] a week later.

Also worth noting that this text is not only entirely AI generated, but meant for other agents to read, not us humans.

[1] https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey

[2] https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/

Re: Harness Engineering

#30

Post by [deleted] »

iTokio wrote: post #5

It’s fascinating to live through a the emergence of a new technology and to see people trying to make sense of it as they go. 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 t…

[deleted]
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