Harness Engineering Building Reliable Workflows Around Non-Deterministic Agents

Agents are non-deterministic by design. Same prompt, two runs, two outputs. That fact is not going away, and no model upgrade will fix it. The fix is structural. The harness, the layered set of files, tools, gates, and conventions around the agent that narrows the band of outputs to one you can ship. Reliability is not determinism. Reliability is "the band of outputs we get is acceptable, observable, and recoverable." This book teaches harness engineering as a discipline. Not magic prompts. Not vendor tricks. Engineering practice applied to a new substrate. The reader builds the project harness first: tests, pre-commit gates, rule files, skills, hooks. Then the team harness, where contracts replace tickets and three touchpoints replace mid-flight approvals. Then the organization harness, where rule packs are versioned dependencies that teams consume rather than copy. Then the maintenance discipline (two flywheels, learning and pruning) that keeps any of it honest as the codebase moves underneath it. The case studies are tools the author shipped along the way and learned from in public. Bridle taught the maintenance flywheels. Sellier taught that prescriptive starter kits adopt faster than build-your-own toolkits. Intent-driven-delivery taught that the team layer can be reified instead of talked about. Keystone is the synthesis. The chapter on it includes what the author got wrong, not only what shipped. 分享此书 分类 Agentic Engineering 反馈 联系作者们