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Comment on Harness Engineering

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The term harness engineering does not come from Birgitta Boeckeler's article in martinfowler.com. It was first used by Mitchel Hashimoto months earlier in his 'My AI adoption journey' blog post [1], and immediately picked up by OpenAI [2] a week later.

Also worth noting that this text is not only entirely AI generated, but meant for other agents to read, not us humans.

[1] https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey

[2] https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/

The site looks like aislop after skimming through 10 of his docs on the site, and the mistake you pointed out.

Something feels off, and claims on the site do not seem credible. Def not manually verified. If it was verified, the author did not go deep enough to give credits where it's due.

The only thing I got out of the site was to see terms I never heard of.

Honestly it would be helpful for someone to collect a list of these articles and concepts in a single location for engineers to get up to speed on these concepts. I think that is the only advantage of this AI generated website at the moment.

the one by https://earendil.com/posts/what-is-a-harness/ is also a good read

and if you want to see what a simple harness implementation looks like you can just dive into the code and ask your favorite agent about it

https://github.com/smol-env/smol

https://github.com/earendil-works/pi

Interesting: I initially confused smol for https://github.com/huggingface/smolagents

What they say about posting the wrong answer on social media is proven true here (though not my intention!). Thanks for the enlightenment!

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