Harness Engineering
Designing Tool Boundaries, Durable State, Budgets, and Review Around the Agent Loop
By
Tenten AI FDE Team
Systems Architecture
Published
Updated
Read time
6 min
Abstract
An agent’s decision loop needs an execution environment: tools, permissions, state, budgets and a record of what happened. This guide treats that environment as an engineering artifact. A prompt can describe an intended boundary; the runtime must enforce the actual boundary.
OpenAI’s 11 February 2026 harness-engineering case describes a specific team’s work on environments and feedback loops; its results apply to that experiment. For recovery semantics, Temporal’s Tasks documentation distinguishes replayed recorded results from execution attempts. The following reference checklist covers tool contracts, isolation, uncertain side effects, stop conditions and review for the workload you actually intend to run.
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