Harness engineering doesn't mean building your own harness

It means giving the agent enough context to do the right thing

For this week’s Agent Factory podcast, I interviewed Ryan Lopopolo, the engineer who coined the term “agentic harness.”

What’s in the video

• How to Stop Writing Code Manually: Ryan explains how to sculpt smaller feedback loops into long-horizon agentic workflows via harness engineering
• Harness, Deconstructed: Billy Jacobson delivers a code walkthrough of a simple harness, exploring linear and closed-loop styles.
• The Three-Layer Stack: Smitha Kolan breaks down how to use Gemini 3.8 Flash, Antigravity Boost, and the Google Skills GitHub repo to configure memory, tools, and guardrails.

The thing that struck me was how many best practices for scaling software engineering teams also apply to coding agents.

How much code are you writing manually these days? Let me know in the comments!