307 - Harness Engineering - the hard part of AI coding

The hard part of AI coding isn't generating code — it's controlling quality, safety, and drift. Kaushik and Iury break down harness engineering: the five pillars for shaping an agent's environment and what it looks like when teams build custom harnesses from scratch.

Full shownotes at fragmentedpodcast.com.

Show Notes Why it matters

• Harness Engineering - OpenAI's post on building their Codex codebase (~1M lines of code, 1,500 PRs merged, zero manually written)

Shaping the harness

• The Feed's Lost and Found - Iury's newsletter consolidating harness engineering themes

1. Agent legibility
2. Closed feedback loops
3. Persistent memory
4. Entropy control
5. Blast radius controls

Building the harness

• Minions: Stripe's one-shot, end-to-end coding agents - Stripe forked Goose to build custom agents for their codebase
• Goose - open-source coding agent from Block
• Superpowers by Jesse Vincent - skills that enforce a proper software engineering process
• Open Code - open-source coding agent you can fork and customize

Other resources

• Agent Harness Glossary - Latent Patterns
• Towards self-driving codebases - Cursor
• Agentic Workflows - GitHub Next
• Future of Software Development - ThoughtWorks

Get in touch

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Co-hosts:

• Kaushik Gopal
• Iury Souza

[!fyi] We transitioned from Android development to AI starting withEp. #300. Listen to that episode for the full story behind our new direction.