Harness Engineering: Three Types of Context
hugobowne · x · 2026-07-11
The post explains the concept of harness engineering, which the author believes is essentially context engineering for both the agent and the human.
A good harness must manage three types of context:
- User instructions: prompts, annotation files, AGENTS.md, plans, skills, etc.
- Environmental feedback: tests, logs, errors, actual execution results
- Tool results: information generated during reading, searching, editing, or running code
The core goal is to amplify signals and reduce noise. The author and Nico also hosted a two-hour workshop covering how to build this mechanism, adapt it to models like Fable 5 and GPT-5.6, and determine when a specific feature has become obsolete.
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