Harness Engineering
Model-agnostic autonomous engineering harness and control plane.
The Problem
Monolithic prompt loops and bare LLMs fail when building complex software because they lack persistent organizational memory, deterministic verification gates, and domain isolation. Unverified claims of success lead to subtle bugs and manual production crashes.
Key Decisions
- Domain Specialization: Partitioned the software engineering lifecycle into 7 isolated domain harnesses (Specification, Research, Architecture, Engineering, Evaluation, Deployment, Learning) to prevent prompt dilution.
- Deterministic Quality Gates: Designed an execution engine that halts immediately upon assertion or harness failure, requiring concrete evidence before advancing.
- Closed-Loop Telemetry: Integrated runtime telemetry capture that extracts failure post-mortems and runtime events into queryable RDF semantic knowledge graph triples (“Loss becomes Information”).
Results
- Verification: 100% deterministic quality gating with an immutable evidence store.
- Continuous Learning: Semantic memory updater turns runtime errors into permanent platform knowledge.
What I Learned
An agent’s reliability is bounded not by model intelligence alone, but by the rigor and determinism of the software harness that surrounds it.
[Built as an autonomous engineering control plane. Source code is public.]