Agent Harness Engineering

A coding agent is the model plus everything you build around it. Harness engineering treats that scaffolding as a real artifact, and it tightens every time the agent slips.

编码智能体就是模型加上你围绕它构建的一切。框架工程将那个脚手架视为真正的产物，每次智能体失足时它都会收紧。

Roughly: anytime you find an agent makes a mistake, you take the time to engineer a solution such that the agent never makes that mistake again.

大致上：每当你发现 agent 犯错时，你就花时间设计一个解决方案，使得 agent 再也不会犯那个错误。

We’ve spent the last two years arguing about models. Which one is smartest, which one writes the cleanest React, which one hallucinates less. That conversation is fine as far as it goes, but it’s missing the other half of the system. The model is one input into a running agent. The rest is the harness: the prompts, tools, context policies, hooks, sandboxes, subagents, feedback loops, and recovery paths wrapped around the model so it can actually finish something.

过去两年，我们一直在争论模型。哪个最聪明、哪个写出的 React 最干净、哪个幻觉最少。这种讨论到此为止还行，但它遗漏了系统的另一半。模型只是运行中 agent 的一个输入。其余的是 harness：围绕模型包装的提示、工具、上下文策略、钩子、沙箱、子代理、反馈循环和恢复路径，以便它能真正完成某事。

A decent model with a great harness beats a great model with a bad harness. I’ve watched this play out on my own work over and over. And increasingly the interesting engineering isn’t in picking the model, it’s in designing the scaffolding around it.

一个优秀框架搭配的普通模型胜过一个糟糕框架搭配的优秀模型。 我在自己的工作中反复看到这种情况。而且越来越有趣的工程不在于挑选模型，而在于设计围绕它的脚手架。

That discipline now has a name. Viv Trivedy coined the term harness engineering, and his “Anatomy of an Agent Harness” post is the cleanest derivation of what a harness actually is and why each piece exists. Dex Horthy has been tracking the pattern as it emerges. HumanLayer frames most agent failures as “skill issues” that come down to configuration rather than model weights. Anthropic’s engineering team has published what I think is the best public breakdown of how to design a harness for long-running work. And Birgitta Böckeler has a good overview of what this looks like from the user’s side.

那个学科现在有名字了。Viv Trivedy 创造了术语 harness engineering，他的 “Anatomy of an Agen...