📖 Step 9: AI/LLM#243 / 291

Harness Engineering

Harness Engineering

📖One-line summary

Designing the scaffolding (tools, loops, checks) around an agent so it doesn't fall off the rails.

💡Easy explanation

Designing the 'safety harness' that wraps an agent so it doesn't go off the rails. With the right tools, retries, and checks, the same model behaves much more reliably.

Example

Safety scaffolding wrapped around the agent

LLM agent
🤖
1. Tool call
2. Failure → retry (backoff)
3. 3 failures → escalate to human

Vibe coding prompt examples

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Make our internal data-analysis agent reliable. Design retry, backoff, and human-escalation strategy for tool-call failures.

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The agent keeps calling the same tool in a loop. Write the harness in TypeScript with loop-count, token-budget, and stop-condition.

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Reduce hallucinations in agent output. Sketch a verification-then-regenerate guard loop in pseudocode.

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