# Harness Engineering: Building Reliable Workflows Around Non-Deterministic Agents

> Source: <https://tacoda.medium.com/harness-engineering-building-reliable-workflows-around-non-deterministic-agents-2f01d9485cf2?source=rss-bf474619cf47------2>
> Published: 2026-06-26 21:27:58+00:00

Hello everyone. I just released a book about harness engineering. It’s on LeanPub. Pay what you want, starts at $10.

[https://leanpub.com/harness-engineering](https://leanpub.com/harness-engineering)

The discipline, the taxonomy, the behavioral system, the reliability layers, rules, guides, corpus, playbooks, rule cascades, architecture as communication, tools, skills, agents, plugins, MCP, evals, delivery orchestration, continuous delivery with agents, PR as checkpoints, policy libraries for team and org extension, patterns and anti-patterns, harness debt, post-mortem, harness curation, loop engineering. Everything I have learned over the past six months with hands-on experiments with a real production codebase.

We have a problem right now with junior and mid level engineers feeling the pressure of AI. I think we have an obligation to help them — and I think that means providing a path to senior. How could they get to senior if the agent does everything for them?

*We must give juniors the support they need to become seniors.*

One of the goals with this book is to support these folks in their growth by showing the big picture, and then anchoring it with cited works of software engineering canon. This book gives both and has an appendix specifically for juniors with how to operate and grow in the world of agentic coding.

If you are concerned about losing your job or not being able to find a job doing software engineering because of LLMs, then this book is for you!

The book also covers scopes from single contributor to enterprise and provides actionable advice whether you read a particular part or the whole thing. It offers benefits to anyone looking to learn how to get better results out of their coding agents, regardless of experience, role, project, team, company, or organization.

I hope it serves you well.
