Justy: Okay so Birgitta’s saying we went from vibe coding to—what’d she call it—harness engineering in a year.
Cody: Harness engineering. Yeah.
Justy: And the jump is from pasting together Stack Overflow snippets to agents that can self-correct with… conventions and test suites?
Cody: Right. Feed-forward tools like lazy-loaded skills save context window, feedback tools like static analysis catch mistakes before they ship.
Justy: Mm-hm. So it’s not just speed—it’s confidence.
Justy: Anyway. How was your flight from DC?
Cody: Delayed. Two hours on the tarmac. Then the seat pocket was full of someone else’s trash. Classic.
Justy: Ugh. And you still showed up to argue with me about AI?
Cody: Someone’s gotta.
Justy: But back to the evolution: monolithic MCP servers got replaced by lazy-loaded skills, CLI scripts, right?
Cody: Yeah. And context window’s the bottleneck. So you chunk it into skills you pull in only when you need them.
Justy: So that’s the feed-forward part?
Cody: Exactly. Then feedback’s the tests and static analysis that tell the agent ‘hey you messed up row forty-seven.’
Justy: And the UI split’s interesting too. Terminal tools like Claude Code for headless runs, Cursor for when you need the visual debug.
Cody: I mean… that tracks. You don’t need a GUI if it’s just running scripts. But debugging a whole agent? Yeah. Good luck in a terminal.
Justy: You say that like you’ve tried.
Cody: I have. It’s NOT fun.
Justy: So the real shift’s the harness. Conventions up front, tests on the back end. And the risk model—success odds, failure impact, detectability—feels almost… boringly practical.
Cody: Boring’s good when you’re shipping code. But I dunno. ‘Harness engineering’ sounds like a buzzword we’ll all regret in six months.
Justy: That’s such a Cody take.
Cody: It’s ACCURATE.
Justy: Fine. But who actually benefits? Teams that can afford the guardrails, or the ones already moving fast?
Cody: The ones who can define their conventions AND their tests. If your repo’s a mess, the harness won’t save you.
Justy: So it rewards discipline. Which… fair.
Justy: Alright. Episode four seventy-five in the books. Try not to get stuck in a terminal this week.
Cody: No promises.