LangChain's Harrison Chase on 'Goal Engineering': designing goals for agents
hwchase17 · x · 2026-11-15
LangChain founder Harrison Chase co-authored "Goal Engineering: How to Design Goals" with Actively AI's mgarimella and Anshul Gupta, arguing that as agents take on dramatically larger task scopes, designing goals correctly becomes critical.
Key points:
- Prompt → Context → Goal is the next evolution in connecting agents to real outcomes;
- Replying, JoshARosen adds a caveat: agents face collections of granular sub-goals rather than one goal, so goal engineering is really about aligning a series of goals and mapping their dependencies.
The piece distills lessons learned at Actively AI.
Related event: LangChain Founder Proposes "Goal Engineering" for Agents(3 posts)→
More from coding & agent
- Cursor runs unattended for 1+ hours: watching processes and auto-fixing failures — NickPassig · 2026-11-15
- Agents fail quietly without context, harness, and human gates — Pavan_Belagatti · 2026-11-15
- Stanford's CS329A Self-Improving AI Agents course: 9 free lectures now online — omarsar0 · 2026-11-15
- Flex-RSI benchmark tests whether agents can self-improve across 18 frontier models — _vztu · 2026-11-15
- Google open-sources AX, a Kubernetes-style orchestrator for running fleets of autonomous agents — rakyll · 2026-11-15
- Reddit: swapping prompt tweaking for four context files made Claude output dramatically better — Exact_Proposal8849 · 2026-11-15