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Writing

Notes on harness engineering, agent evaluation, and building reliable AI systems for real engineering work.

2026 11 pieces
  1. Mediation, Not Intermediation

    Why the 'fix your foundations before AI' message has it backwards: agentic workflows are the way out of legacy data, and governance worth having is co-designed from practice, not committees.

    agentic-aiharness-engineeringdata-engineeringgovernance
  2. Task Worlds and Meta-Harnesses

    How task worlds, Badiou, Plasticity, and the AEC-Bench meta-harness turn task prose, evidence, review, governance, and repair into runnable machinery.

    agentic-aiharness-engineeringaec-benchtask-worlds
  3. Plausible Answers, Failed Workflows

    An AEC-Bench release evaluation read as workflow reliability, not prose quality. Chapter by chapter: why a model can produce a plausible answer and still fail the durable record a project has to audit.

    harness-engineeringagentic-aiai-in-aecai-benchmarks
  4. Making aec-bench Trainable with Prime Lab

    How aec-bench and Prime Intellect's Lab turn engineering benchmarks into verifier-backed RL environments, adapter training runs, and inspectable traces.

    aec-benchprime-labreinforcement-learningagent-evaluation
  5. Executable Standards

    Better tools and verifiers are not enough. The next harness boundary is the clause itself — turning standards, briefs, and codes into versioned predicates and replayable certificates.

    harness-engineeringautoformalisationai-in-aecformal-methods
  6. The Third Axis

    What happens when you let the harness improve itself — two experiments in feedback-driven harness evolution, and an honest look at how rough the trajectory actually is.

    harness-engineeringagentic-aiself-improvementautoresearch
  7. What If the Harness Could Improve Itself?

    Applying the autoresearch pattern to self-improve an engineering agent harness. Automated prompt optimisation across HVAC audit tasks on Claude and GPT-4.1-mini, showing how harness engineering compounds when the improvement loop runs itself.

    harness-engineeringautoresearchagentic-aiai-in-aec
  8. Benchmarking Agents on Real Engineering Work Is Already Teaching Us Something Important

    Benchmarking AI agents on real HVAC engineering tasks across Claude and GPT models. Results on harness-dependent capability, agent evaluation design, and why AEC-domain benchmarks reveal what general benchmarks miss.

    harness-engineeringagentic-aiai-in-aecai-benchmarks
  9. Where Capability Actually Lives in Agentic Engineering

    In AEC and domain-specific engineering, AI agent capability lives not in the model alone but in harness engineering — the tools, verifiers, orchestration, and process design that make agentic work reliable.

    harness-engineeringagentic-aiai-in-aecengineering-ai