Harness engineering emerges as a playbook for managing coding agents

The article argues that engineers are splitting their work between building a harness of constraints, tools, and documentation for agents and directing the agents' work.

It cites OpenAI, Stripe, and Anthropic examples, including architecture guardrails, custom linter messages, AGENTS.md updates, and plan-first execution.

The author notes that open problems remain around code maintainability, verification at scale, and adopting these practices in older codebases.