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: Everything added around the model to improve generation; agent = model + harness
scope: Development environment, sandbox, skills that teams build on
dominant_period: 2026