Expert Showcase: Architecture Meets Harness Engineering
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
“Harness engineering” is the tech term of the year. It’s the work of designing scaffolding around AI coding agents, including the guardrails, context, verification loops, and sensors that make agents reliable enough for production software. Strip away the new vocabulary and much of it looks familiar: Fitness functions, constraints expressed as code, resilience patterns, and feedback loops are tools architects have been sharpening for a decade, and they’re exactly what agents need.
Join host Neal Ford and a lineup of experts to hear how teams are encoding architectural decisions so that both humans and agents can act on them, learn why resilience is one of the first qualities architects want to harness, and understand what it takes to trust an agent with real production work.
We’re still working on finalizing the schedule for this event. Please check back closer to the event date for more information.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
- Understand what an agent harness actually is, and where architectural constraints, guides, and sensors fit within it
- Express architectural decisions and trade-offs as code, so agents and humans get fast, verifiable feedback when systems drift
- Apply resilience patterns to systems where agents write and ship a growing share of the code, and know when to reduce supervision safely
Your Host
Neal Ford
Neal Ford is an independent software consultant, best-selling author, speaker, and innovator in building concrete verification mechanisms for software architecture, for humans or agents. He’s an internationally recognized expert on software development and delivery, especially at the intersection of agile engineering techniques and software architecture. Neal has authored magazine articles, nine books (and counting), and dozens of video presentations, and has spoken at hundreds of developers’ conferences worldwide. His topics include software architecture, continuous delivery, functional programming, cutting-edge software engineering, and improving technical presentations. Check out his web site at Nealford.com.