Fragmented - AI Developer Podcast

307 - Harness Engineering - the hard part of AI coding

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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
        6. 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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            ways.

            We want to hear all the feedback: what's working, what's not, topics you'd like

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              • Co-hosts:
              • Kaushik Gopal
              • Iury Souza

                • [!fyi] We transitioned from Android development to AI starting with
                Ep. #300. Listen to that episode for the full story behind

                our new direction.

                ...more
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                Fragmented - AI Developer PodcastBy Kaushik Gopal, Iury Souza
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