Agentic Systems

The live demo repo for this series is 67ailab/harness-engineering, and for this post I did add a real repo capability before publishing. The repo now includes a workflow export layer in src/harness_engineering/workflow.py, plus a workflow CLI command in src/harness_engineering/cli.py that renders the current harness orchestration as structured JSON or Mermaid. That change shipped in commit a007c08. That may sound like a documentation flourish. It is not. The point of an orchestration post is not to wave vaguely at boxes and arrows. It is to make the runtime’s control structure explicit enough that you can inspect it, reason about it, and argue about whether it is the right one. ...

The live demo repo for this series is 67ailab/harness-engineering, and for this post I did add a real new capability before publishing. The repo now includes a small MCP-style adapter layer in src/harness_engineering/mcp.py, plus CLI entry points to inspect tool descriptors and call tools through that boundary. The exact repo change shipped in commit e21f361. That addition matters because this is the first point in the series where the demo has to answer a question the broader ecosystem now forces on every agent builder: what exactly is the boundary between your harness and the tool protocol? ...

Artificial intelligence is entering a new engineering phase. For the last two years, the dominant conversation centered on prompt engineering: how to ask better questions, structure better instructions, and squeeze more reliable output from large language models. That work mattered, and still matters. But as models have become capable of planning, tool use, coding, browsing, testing, and acting over many steps, the practical bottleneck has shifted. The central production problem is no longer simply how to prompt the model. It is how to build the runtime around the model so that the model can act effectively, safely, durably, and measurably. ...

The live demo repo for this series is 67ailab/harness-engineering, and this post stays anchored to the code that exists there today. I did not add a new repo capability for this article. The point of this installment is to dissect the current harness as it actually stands: what lives in src/harness_engineering/, how the pieces fit together, and which parts are carrying the reliability burden. That matters because “agent” is now a dangerously overloaded word. Many teams still mean either a model that can call functions or a prompt loop with some memory and tool wrappers. Those are ingredients, not a runtime anatomy. ...

The live demo repo for this series is 67ailab/harness-engineering. This first post is grounded in the current public repo state rather than a made-up architecture diagram. For this article, I did not add a new repo feature before publishing; the existing baseline already supports the core claim. At the time of writing, that baseline includes typed tools, checkpointed run state, resumable execution, an approval gate before writing artifacts, per-step traces, a planner/reviewer split, and optional local OpenAI-compatible model support. ...