Harness Engineering: Designing the Systems That Make AI Coding Agents Reliable($17.99Value)

Description

Harness Engineering: Building and Controlling Autonomous AI Coding Agents Model capability does not guarantee reliable software outcomes. This book is for hands-on software engineers and technical leaders who want to move from ad hoc AI coding assistance to harness engineering —designing the execution system around the model: tools, control loops, state and continuity, verification, observability, recovery, and governance. Across foundations, design and build, operate and scale, and governance and adoption you will learn how to: Define the split between model reasoning and harness design, and build minimum viable control loops with checks and escalations. - Set acceptance criteria, failure thresholds, and escalation rules before you automate; then implement a baseline single-agent harness with approvals, tests, and policy checks. - Introduce multi-agent roles and handoffs with explicit contracts, and structure repository-native artefacts for consistent retrieval and execution. - Combine deterministic checks with independent evaluation in verification pipelines; instrument cost and throughput; and design interruption-safe, resumable workflows. - Apply least privilege, approvals, and safety boundaries for risky actions and secrets. - Encode standards as deterministic checks, choose metrics that reflect reliability and maintainability as well as throughput, and roll harness practices out across teams with clear ownership—including a ninety-day adoption roadmap. The tone is practical and source-aware: verification pairs deterministic checks with independent evaluation; governance is treated as an architectural default, not a late add-on; and autonomy is discussed with explicit human checkpoints and measurement—without promising unsupervised production coding. If you need a disciplined, engineering-first approach to agentic coding workflows, this book delivers the concepts, patterns, and operating discipline to match.