Harness Engineering
emergingOrigin: Symphony/OpenAI documentation, March 2026
Building machine-legible codebases and instruction files so that AI agents can operate autonomously. The 'harness' is the infrastructure that makes a codebase agent-ready: WORKFLOW.md, SPEC.md, clear CI/CD gates, isolated workspaces. Related to but distinct from agentic engineering: harness engineering is the infrastructure layer.
Usage
Use when discussing what teams actually need to build to make coding agents work reliably. 'Are you doing agentic engineering or have you actually built the harness?' is a signal question.
Mutations & variants
'Machine-legible codebase' — what harness engineering produces
'Agent-ready repo' — colloquial version
Shelf life: Emerging — will become standard vocabulary in 2026–2027