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4 posts tagged Reliability.
Everyone engineers the prompt; almost nobody engineers the loop around it. Stop conditions, drain loops, retry with backoff, compaction cycles, breaker escalation, budgets, and human gates — the outer-loop mechanics that make an agent converge instead of run away.
Harness engineering is the discipline of building everything around the model — PTY plumbing, lifecycle hooks, mailboxes, memory, budgets, human gates, observability — because that's where agent reliability actually comes from. A definition, and four case studies from inside Munder Difflin.
Agents fail constantly: tools error, steps stall, output goes wrong. Reliability isn't avoiding failure — it's making each one contained and recoverable.
The discipline that makes an autonomous coding agent trustworthy: prove every claim, reproduce the green, and check the fix — not just the intent.