Harness over prompting

Prompt quality matters, but harness quality is what keeps agent outputs reliable once stakes increase.

February 17, 2026

1 min readยท
harnessnote

If your agent fails in production, start by debugging boundaries, state, and recovery logic before tweaking prompts.

The failure is often in orchestration, not generation.

A prompt that generates perfect SQL still fails if the harness doesn't validate the query against the schema before execution. Getting from zero to demo is a model problem. Getting from demo to production is a harness problem.

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