Expert Showcase: Architecture Meets Harness Engineering
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Software architecture for the agent era
“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
Recommended follow-up
- Read Harness Engineering (book)
- Take Architecture as Code (live online course with Neal Ford)
- Read Team Topologies (book)
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Introduction – Neal Ford (5 minutes)
Neal Ford welcomes you to the Expert Showcase.
Session to Come (35 minutes)
Please check back for more information.
Team Topologies as the “Infrastructure for Agency” with AI – Matthew Skelton (35 minutes)
AI adoption isn’t only a technology challenge. It’s an organizational design challenge. Conflux CEO Matthew Skelton explores how the principles of Team Topologies can help organizations create the conditions for AI to deliver value safely, effectively, and humanely. Learn how empowered teams, clear service boundaries, manageable cognitive load, and well-designed interfaces provide the guardrails AI agents need to operate with purpose and accountability. You’ll leave with practical approaches for establishing bounded agency, preventing unbounded access to sensitive data and resources, and equipping teams to become effective stewards of AI.
Break (5 minutes)
Mostly Harness: Architecture and GenAI – Barry O’Reilly (35 minutes)
Software architecture is a young profession and one which we don’t properly understand. It’s been apparent for decades that it isn’t reducible to a standard, repeatable method that can easily be taught. With that in mind, reducing architecture to a mechanical harness seems like a stretch that’s destined to fail as all previous attempts have. But, Residuality Theory creator Barry O’Reilly argues, perhaps this journey can help us finally understand what architecture is and stop being blinded by the programmer's need to reduce everything to an algorithm.
Software Architecture in Your Harness: Architectural Principles, Trade-offs and Conformance When Agents Write the Code – Eoin Woods (35 minutes)
Every agentic code generation harness embodies a set of architectural decisions, whether they’re implicit or explicit. We need to make this deliberate. Luckily many of our established architecture techniques are very effective at guiding agents to implement the architecture we want. Architecture principles allow us to define actionable goals, priorities, and constraints. Trade-off analysis for our architectural qualities make the critical qualities and the tensions between them clear. Architectural decisions record what has been decided, and why, to prevent agents making those decisions again and again. Automated tests, fitness functions and code quality checks can be used to continually verify that the agent is respecting the architectural constraints that we have defined. Join software architecture expert Eoin Woods to discover why the core skills are more critical than ever in the age of agentic development to stay in control of what the agents build.
Break (5 minutes)
Session to Come (35 minutes)
Please check back for more information.
Keynote: Accelerating Harness Engineering Using ADL – Mark Richards (35 minutes)
Harness engineering is the technique of building reliable agentic systems by specifying environmental factors and constraints, thereby avoiding agentic guesswork and keeping agents on a correct path of what it can and can’t do. However, a proper harness should include architectural constraints as well, things like structural aspects, database constraints, operational characteristics, and so on. In this keynote, software architect Mark Richards shows you how to leverage the Architecture Definition Language (ADL) from his and Neal Ford’s latest book Architecture as Code. ADL is a great way of accelerating harness engineering, providing agents with the necessary guidance for creating systems with a reliable architecture.
Closing Remarks – Neal Ford (5 minutes)
Neal Ford closes out today’s event.
Your Hosts and Guests
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.
Matthew Skelton
Matthew Skelton is CEO at Conflux and an internationally recognized authority on organizational design and technology-enabled value delivery. He helps leaders improve decision-making, reshape operating models, redesign capability placement, and build cultures that enable sustainable high performance without burnout. His work brings together organizational design, platform thinking, and humane leadership to help enterprises reduce friction, improve value flow, and thrive amid change.
Barry O’Reilly
Barry O’Reilly is a veteran architect and the creator of Residuality Theory. He’s the author of Residues and The Architect's Paradox. Barry’s a former chief architect at Microsoft, where he led the global solution architecture community. He’s a PhD candidate in complexity science and software design.
Eoin Woods
Eoin Woods is an independent consultant in the fields of software architecture, green software, and software engineering. Previously, he spent 10 years as CTO a well-known global digital engineering firm. Earlier in his career he developed databases, created security software, and designed way too many systems to move money around in complicated ways. Eoin is a regular conference speaker, has coauthored three books on software architecture, and was the recipient of the 2018 Linda Northrup Award for Software Architecture from the Software Engineering Institute at CMU. His website is www.eoinwoods.info.
Mark Richards
Mark Richards is an experienced, hands-on software architect involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of microservices architectures and other distributed systems in a variety of technologies. He has been in the software industry since 1983 and has significant experience and expertise in application, integration, and enterprise architecture. Mark is the founder of DeveloperToArchitect.com, a free website devoted to helping developers in the journey to becoming a software architect. In addition to hands-on consulting, Mark has authored numerous technical books and videos, including his two latest books Fundamentals of Software Architecture and Software Architecture: The Hard Parts that he co-authored with Neal Ford. Mark has spoken at hundreds of conferences and user groups around the world on a variety of enterprise-related technical topics.