Think Different

Folks are talking more to their chatbot than to colleagues.

We’re deploying AI agents into remote work environments that regulators are actively tightening, e.g.
* Italy just extended criminal health and safety obligations from companies to employees working from home;
* In the US, surveys are calling 2026 the year of “Great Compliance” with monitoring tools expanding.

In an org, someone will have to think about how employees still interact with each other and handle their new AI collaborators without stressing out.

I bet soon we’ll be talking about Employee Experience Design.

Now you have agents that can write entire codebases while you sip coffee. So, AI coding tools are pushing far more changes into delivery pipelines, that were never modernized, creating a velocity paradox where teams move faster but take on more deployment risk, manual rework, and QA burnout. Everything after the code is now the bottleneck, that is the gap that harness engineering is now trying to close.

Harness engineering has become one of the trends in AI lately, taking over context eng and prompt eng before it. Essentially being the discipline of designing systems around agents rather than obsessing over prompts. Meaning: designing the constraints, feedback loops, tests, and tooling that sit around AI agents so they can safely write and maintain large systems.

Testimonials describe teams shipping applications with over one million lines of production code generated by agents, while humans focus on the harness and guardrails rather than the individual functions. Aggressive teams are already seeing order of magnitude productivity gains compared to late 2025 workflows, mainly when they invest in robust harnesses for intent capture, specs, context, and automated feedback.

There are two possible futures for small teams: one where AI just sprays more code and business rules into an already fragile stack; and another where you design a harness that makes life easier for your fellow humans 🙂 I am less interested in a future where AI writes all the code, and more in one where small teams can offer big company reliability without big company bureaucracy.