{"slug": "this-just-rearranged-my-view-on-harness-engineering", "title": "This just rearranged my view on harness engineering", "summary": "A developer explores the concept of loop engineering as software engineering, inspired by an article on LinkedIn. They built a Python prototype using Claude and highlight the importance of distributed systems patterns like dead letter queues and circuit breakers for managing agent loops. The developer is now revising their book on harness engineering to incorporate these insights.", "body_md": "I just read this article — I recommend you do as well.\n\n[Loop Engineering Is Just Software Engineering. We Have a Name for That.](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/loop-engineering-just-software-we-have-name-mike-piccolo-yb73c/)\n\nI’ve been doing a lot of work on harnesses, but I have been focusing at the project level. I’ve only recently started to delve into LangChain/LangGraph. I built my own daemon that implements this with a shell on my local machine. It works, but it could be better. I had always thought of these as two layers and they’ve become crystal clear to me now.\n\nWhen I read this, I immediately want to try it, but I do not have access to an API key yet. Also, I don’t really want to clobber my organization with API pricing. So I asked claude to build a prototype in Python given the description. I tested it, and it worked pretty well.\n\nBut if you’re already at the API point (and you probably are if you are looping), here’s the tool: [https://iii.dev/](https://iii.dev/)\n\nThe single most important takeaway from this article is that we’ve already solve the problems of loop engineering with distributed systems. Instead of getting stuck in loops or overpaying, you can take advantage of the queueing pattern — dead letter queues, circuit breakers, retries, and so on.\n\n*This idea is dynamite.*\n\nIt had slipped past me because I was focused on the project level of the harness and loop engineering has been mainly focusing on creating loops with agents, not *how* to do it. So diagrams and explanations tend to lead to synchronous or daemon sorts of solutions. In hindsight, it seems so obvious.\n\nIt also removes the orchestrator problem: the fact that different subagents about bound to a main orchestrator thread replicates Brooks’ warning for organizations in the form of agents. But with the distributed system, there is no orchestrator — that’s been reduced to state. Brilliant!\n\nIt also shifts my vocabulary. I’m currently writing a book about harness engineering: [https://leanpub.com/harness-engineering](https://leanpub.com/harness-engineering)\n\nI was focusing on the repository level, but now the delivery harness (as I was calling it) builds one level up. This will probably cause me to have to re-arrange my definitions, but here’s where my head is at.\n\nI visualize the harness like an onion. But the harness I’ve been talking about has been *code*, and the delivery harness is a *service*. That means that personal still sits at the center, wrapped by the project (or repo) harness, and then wrapped with team and org harnesses that implement policies just like software libraries, and then wrapped in the delivery or orchestration harness. I’ve used some tools like this recently, like Hivemind ([https://cohen-liel.github.io/hivemind/](https://cohen-liel.github.io/hivemind/)). It’s great, and there are plenty of others to try, but this has changed my entire outlook on the type of architecture the delivery harness should use. I think he’s right — it’s a distributed system.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/this-just-rearranged-my-view-on-harness-engineering", "canonical_source": "https://tacoda.medium.com/this-just-rearranged-my-view-on-harness-engineering-58ccf3283d0c?source=rss-bf474619cf47------2", "published_at": "2026-06-25 23:16:14+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-25 23:36:42.717800+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-agents", "developer-tools", "ai-research"], "entities": ["LangChain", "LangGraph", "Claude", "Hivemind", "Mike Piccolo", "iii.dev", "Leanpub"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/this-just-rearranged-my-view-on-harness-engineering", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/this-just-rearranged-my-view-on-harness-engineering.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/this-just-rearranged-my-view-on-harness-engineering.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/this-just-rearranged-my-view-on-harness-engineering.jsonld"}}