Self-paced course19 lessons · 5 modules

Mastering Harness Engineering

Agent = Model + Harness. The model is a commodity; the harness is the product. This course teaches you to engineer the part that matters.

Everything that wraps around an AI model to make it dependable in the real world — orchestration, context, memory, tools, guardrails, evaluation, and economics — is the harness. This guide takes you from first principles to running production agent programs. Work through it in order; every lesson ends with a quiz whose wrong answers teach as much as the right ones. Your progress is saved locally in your browser.

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Module 1 — Foundations

Why the discipline exists, what a harness is made of, and how to think about the commodity at its core.

  1. What Is Harness Engineering?
  2. Anatomy of a Harness
  3. The Model Layer: Commodity Intelligence and Capability Overhang

Module 2 — Context & Memory

What the model sees, what the system remembers, and where organizational judgment lives.

  1. Context Engineering: What the Model Sees
  2. Context Graphs and Organizational Judgment
  3. Memory: Session, Agent, and Organizational Tiers

Module 3 — Control

Steering behavior: specs, prompts, tools, and the guardrails that keep production honest.

  1. Specs: The Spec Is the Program
  2. Prompting at the Frontier: The Inversion
  3. Tools, MCP, and Action Surfaces
  4. Guardrails, Permissions, and Governance

Module 4 — Evaluation & Reliability

The discipline that separates teams that ship from teams that demo.

  1. Observability Is Not Evals
  2. Building Eval Harnesses
  3. Review Architecture and the Self-Review Trap
  4. The Improvement Loop: Autoresearch for Harnesses
  5. Self-Improving Harnesses: Search, Evolution, and RSI

Module 5 — Production & Economics

Getting to production, pricing the work, orchestrating at scale — and building your own harness.

  1. Pilot to Production: The Forward-Deployed Craft
  2. Agent Economics: Pricing, Tokens, and Pods
  3. Multi-Agent Orchestration Patterns
  4. Capstone: Build Your Own Harness

Reference

  1. Glossary of Harness Engineering