Build agent harnesses
Skill hiteshbandhu/skills-i-use/skills/ai-engineer-talks/build-agent-harnesses
Drop-in skills and plugins for your AI development workflows
npx -y skills add hiteshbandhu/skills-i-use --skill build-agent-harnessesAssembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.
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Runs checklists and workflows for designing, hardening, and operating agent harnesses — guardrails, verify steps, tool loops, durable sessions, eval, quotas, coding/deep-research/voice harnesses. Use when the user builds agent runtimes, asks what a harness is, scopes agent vs workflow, or says "agent harness", "guardrails", "verify step", "FOMAT", "durable session".
SKILL.md
3.4 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it
Build agent harnesses
Action playbook from twenty-two AI Engineer talks on agent & harness engineering. Do not summarize talks — pick a workflow and execute it.
Supporting files (read when needed):
- workflows.md — workflows A–L (steps, deliverables, stop conditions)
- source-index.md — src-NNN → talk learnings in ingest-into-skills
Optional deliverables: {SKILL_OUTPUT_DIR}/build-agent-harnesses/ — see skills-i-use OUTPUT.md.
Step 0 — Pick workflow
Use the decision tree below. Open the matching section in workflows.md.
What is the user trying to do?
├─ Define harness vs agent loop + guardrails/verify → A
├─ Decide agent vs workflow for a use case → B
├─ Maturity path: framework → state machine → scale → C
├─ Enterprise: quotas, skills, multi-agent platform → D
├─ Agent evaluation + anti-hype discipline → E
├─ Long-horizon research / deep research harness → F
├─ Coding agent / computer-use / IDE harness → G
├─ Production chat UX: resume, steer, multi-device → H
├─ Operate many parallel coding agents (FOMAT) → I
├─ Regulated / domain-vertical knowledge agents → J
├─ Delete scaffold; maximize LLM compute in backend → K
└─ Post-training / finetune / RL for tool agents → L
Stop summarizing once a workflow is identified — run its checklist.
Install
cp -r skills/build-agent-harnesses ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r skills/build-agent-harnesses ~/.cursor/skills/
cp -r skills/build-agent-harnesses ~/.codex/skills/
From skills-i-use or ingest-into-skills after sync.
Source corpus: ingest-into-skills playlists/agent-harness-engineering-ai-engineer/.
Cross-cutting rules
| Rule | Source |
|---|---|
| Harness = tools + context + guardrails + verify around the model | [src-001 @ 4:36] |
| Do not prompt harder when verify shows failure — fix harness | [src-001 @ 9:37] |
| Agents only when ambiguity/value/error profile justify cost | [src-002 @ 2:57] |
| Every agent is a state machine; prune prompts as models improve | [src-003 @ 4:37] |
| Agent eval needs environments + actions, not I/O strings only | [src-006 @ 7:52] |
| Decouple clients via durable sessions for resume/steer | [src-015 @ 5:25] |
Disputed steps: read talk in source-index.md.
Output to user
- Name the workflow (A–L) and what you are producing
- Save artifacts under
./skill-outputs/build-agent-harnesses/when the user wants files - Do not auto-commit
Invocation examples
@build-agent-harnesses design a harness for our browser agent
agent vs workflow for this support bot?
we need quotas and verify steps for production agents