Howardism · Vol. 03Plate II · No. 02
Harness, in order.
Notes25TopicHarnessOldest10 Apr 2026Newest23 May 2026
Agent loops, tools, orchestration, and Claude Code patterns.
| Title | Summary | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Agent-Native Infrastructure | The world is still built for humans and must be rewritten for agents; "what do I copy-paste to my agent?"; sensors/actuators; agent-to-agent representation | |
| Agentic Loops Overtake Bespoke Systems | DeepMind's *basic* Ralph-loop agent matched its bespoke evolutionary+AlphaProof system as the LLM improved; the bitter lesson / harness-shrinkage confirmed in formal math | |
| AI-Driven Formal Proof Search | LLM generates Lean, compiler verifies every step → eliminates hallucination; DeepMind resolves 9/353 Erdős + 44/492 OEIS open problems; verification as a filter for human review | |
| Evolutionary Proof Search | The full-featured agent's mechanism: population DB of proof sketches, Elo via Plackett–Luce/Gibbs, P-UCB selection, LLM-critic fitness for binary proof eval | |
| Verification as the New Bottleneck | Fiona Fung: coding is no longer the bottleneck — verification, review, maintenance are; shift-left; TDD loses its tax; PR-cycle-time funnel analysis | |
| Vibe Coding vs. Agentic Engineering | Vibe coding raises the floor (anyone builds); agentic engineering preserves the quality bar while going faster; ">10x and widening"; hire on big projects, not puzzles | |
| HTML as the New Markdown | Thariq Shihipar's thesis: as models improve, thousand-line markdown plans overwhelm the *human*; HTML artifacts (visual, interactive) keep humans in the loop. The model-facing harness shrinks while this human-facing harness grows | |
| Agentic Technical Debt | Debt that *compounds* (not just accumulates) because each agentic-coding session re-derives architectural decisions without persistent CLAUDE.md; surfaces late as a forced rewrite | |
| Founder as Agent Orchestrator | Founder role shift: less individual contributor, more orchestrator of specialized AI assistants; non-technical founders unblocked; lean 10-person unicorn structurally enabled | |
| MCP and Computer Use | Anthropic's two complementary connector mechanisms: MCP for structured programmatic access (Salesforce/Drive/Gmail/Slack/Figma + niche industry systems); computer use as the GUI-driving catchall when no MCP exists; Boris Cherny's "to the model, it's just tokens" | |
| Agent Loop Pattern | `/loop` (cron-scheduled) and Ralph Wiggum (backlog-draining) loops as next-generation agent primitive; AFK execution, parallel fan-out, "loops are the future" | |
| Context Window Smart Zone | Smart zone vs dumb zone (Dex Hardy / Matt Pocock): quadratic attention scaling, ~100K marker independent of advertised context; clear-and-restart > compaction; status-line token counting as essential discipline | |
| Deep Modules for Agents | Ousterhout deep-vs-shallow modules applied to agent-friendly codebases; push-vs-pull instruction delivery; reviewer in fresh context; Sandcastle three-agent pattern | |
| Design Concept Grilling | Matt Pocock's `grill-me` skill; reach Brooks "design concept" before any plan; counter to specs-to-code; PRD as destination doc, Kanban as journey doc | |
| Harness Shrinkage as Models Improve | Prompt scaffolding shrinks each model release; Cat Wu's pruning discipline; Boris Cherny "100 lines of code a year from now" claim; mechanical verification stays load-bearing | |
| Model Introspection Feedback | Cat Wu's underrated technique: ask the model why it failed; treat answer as harness-debugging signal not model criticism; caveats around model self-report fidelity | |
| Vertical Slice Tracer Bullets | Pragmatic-Programmer tracer-bullet pattern applied to agent task decomposition; vertical slices > horizontal layers; Kanban-with-blocking-edges over numbered phase plans | |
| Codex App Server Protocol | JSON-RPC stdio protocol for headless Codex sessions: initialize/initialized/thread-start/turn-start handshake, continuation turns reuse thread_id, dynamic tool calls for token-isolated tool injection | |
| Hermes Agent | Nous Research's CLI agent + Gateway daemon (Telegram/Discord/Slack/WhatsApp); AGENTS.md/SOUL.md context split, bounded memory files, DM-pairing auth, container-as-security-boundary model | |
| Symphony | OpenAI's open-source agent orchestrator (March 2026): turns Linear into a control plane for Codex, per-issue workspace, daemon-driven, SPEC.md-as-product, hedged 500% landed-PRs claim | |
| Ticket-Driven Agent Orchestration | The inversion that makes Symphony work: tickets as units of work (not sessions/PRs), DAG dependencies, agent-extensible work graph, "objectives not transitions" | |
| Claude Code Auto Mode | Claude Code permission mode using a classifier to auto-approve safe tool calls and block risky ones; middle ground between default and `--dangerously-skip-permissions` | |
| Client-Side Agent Optimization | AgentOpt's framing of developer-controlled agent optimization (model-per-role, budget, routing) as distinct from server-side serving; the combo abstraction; 13–32× cost gaps between best/worst combinations | |
| Agent Harness Engineering | Patterns for scaffolding long-running LLM agents: environment design, progressive context disclosure, mechanical architecture enforcement, agent code review | |
| Claude Code Best Practices | Anthropic's guide to effective Claude Code usage: context management, verification-driven development, explore→plan→code workflow, environment config |