What Is an Agent Harness? The Part Everyone Skips
The five parts of an agent harness: capability surface, meaning, policy, approval and audit. Only two of them are about power.
Agent Harness01
Series · 4 parts · 2,025–2,026
The layer between a language model and software that already exists: what to expose, how to keep it safe, and how to store an agent so it can be changed without a deploy.
The five parts of an agent harness: capability surface, meaning, policy, approval and audit. Only two of them are about power.
Agent Harness01
Why intent-named operations beat database schemas, auto-generated OpenAPI specs and one-command MCP servers when you hand an application to a model.
Agent Harness02
Read/write enforcement, principal scoping, approval gates, sandboxes and budgets: five safety properties, every one enforced in code, not in a prompt.
Agent Harness03
Store agents as versioned, validated rows instead of writing them as classes, and rollback, diffs, audit, teams and lessons come free. Here is the bill.
Agent Harness04