Agent Harness Wiki

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New Harness Design Notes

Goal

Design a harness that combines three virtues the current landscape tends to separate: Codex’s architectural cleanliness, Hermes’s durable learning loop, and Gas City’s orchestration ambition. The missing fourth ingredient is Anthropic’s insistence on evaluator-driven reality checks. The scored argument for that blend now lives in harness-decision-matrix.

What to borrow from Codex

  • A thin, explicit protocol layer between harness core and user surfaces.
  • Durable session containers with named primitives rather than a monolithic transcript blob.
  • Repo-legibility as a first-class engineering problem, not a documentation afterthought.

What to borrow from Hermes

  • Searchable persistent memory and deliberate user modeling.
  • Skill extraction from successful procedures.
  • Profile isolation so multiple workflows can coexist without memory contamination.

What to borrow from Anthropic

  • Fresh-session handoffs instead of pretending the context window is infinite.
  • Separate evaluator roles with live-system tooling.
  • Explicit sprint contracts and artifact-driven recovery.

What to borrow from Gas City

  • Work as a graph of durable primitives, not only as prose TODOs.
  • Modular orchestration parts rather than one fixed swarm topology.
  • Federation as a long-term possibility once local rigor exists.

What not to borrow from anyone

  • The reflex to turn every coordination problem into one manager session with a stack of subordinates.
  • One universal control shape for routing, memory, task allocation, and review.
  • Implicit coalition logic hidden in chat transcripts instead of explicit work objects.

Provisional architecture

  1. Core runtime: App-Server-like protocol with durable threads and tool events.
  2. Formalization plane: a typed gate that routes problems into the right formal space, as argued in formal-cognition-loop.
  3. Memory plane: searchable personal memory plus project-scoped handoff artifacts.
  4. Work plane: bead-like task graph with explicit state transitions, plus a mix of shared-workspace, bidding, and coalition patterns from non-hierarchical-coordination-patterns rather than one default hierarchy.
  5. Evaluation plane: dedicated reviewer agents with browser/log/metric access.
  6. Surface plane: CLI as the exact textual kernel, then IDE and other clients against the same core, with non-linear control surfaces layered on top where they earn their keep; see non-linear-interface-options-for-next-harness.
  7. Control-plane semantics: causal events, consistent cuts, view epochs, session guarantees, and bounded delegated rights; see legacy-distributed-systems-ideas-for-moldable-operations-studio and moldable-operations-studio-architecture-spec.
  8. Federated collaboration plane: local-first harness nodes, replicated shared spaces, typed peer delegation, and multiplayer operational surfaces rather than one giant manager session; see multiplayer-agent-harnesses-and-p2p-networks.
  9. Experimental model-facing IR plane: keep an explicit place for typed latent-program interfaces that might eventually sit below token text without collapsing into opaque activation sludge; see neural-native-programming and neural-native-programming-via-direct-interfaces-to-transformer-internal-layers.

For work that repeatedly alternates between scouting, tight collaboration, and reaggregation, the right local pattern may be fission-fusion-orchestration rather than a permanent manager-worker tree.

Main caution

Every extra layer must earn its existence. The landscape is full of beautiful abstractions that mostly manufacture new failure modes. A harness should become more modular only when the previous monolith has already become legible. Otherwise one is merely arranging confusions into neighborhoods.

This synthesis depends on formal-cognition-loop, theorem-proving-as-cognitive-kernel, harness-architecture-comparison, harness-quality-comparison, orchestration-topologies, memory-persistence, work-management-primitives, non-linear-interface-options-for-next-harness, legacy-distributed-systems-ideas-for-moldable-operations-studio, moldable-operations-studio-architecture-spec, and multiplayer-agent-harnesses-and-p2p-networks.

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