Comment by vishvananda
7 hours ago
I’m definitely on the deterministic code train as well. All of my success for long running tasks has been around wrapping the agentic harness (cc, codex-cli, etc.) in a deterministic workflow with deterministic gates. We need a name for this outer layer. In my mind that is the true harness because it constrains the agents failure mode. I think flow engineering has been proposed. Maybe it’s the agentic exoskeleton?
I call it tool-response engineering -- the tool-response JSON object itself and any content supplied, plus the available mechanisms after an initial tool call has been made.
I propose Channel Engineering, and will be releasing a paper with the full reasoning soon. The TLDR is that it is a communication channel between a Human and AI, mediated by a deterministic agent loop process. That loop is in control of the channel and needs to own it completely to solve for the reliability of the delivered outcomes in ways that can be concretely measured.
I believe they call it "loop engineering"
Why do you need a different name?
From harness? Because people expect a squishy set of things from a harness that is different from what I end up building. I end up with a rigid internal structure that the harness uses in-turn (tests with clear error messages, tools, etc.) and a matched rigid external structure that drives the turn tracking progress and deterministically handles the overall progress. You could call that whole thing a harness but that makes the definition muddy and hard to talk about. So scaffold or skeleton seems more appropriate. The harness constrains the agent. The matched endoskeleton and exoskeleton gives it structure.