Scout

Entry 49 · Coined 9 Oct 2026 · briefed 23 Oct 2026

Harness²

Harness² (from Google Research and Northwestern) is a framework for improving a frozen, non-retrained agent by rewriting the harness around it instead of fine-tuning the model's weights. It runs two nested recursion loops: a task-level loop that proposes, probes, and composes candidate edits to the harness for the task at hand, and a harnessing-level loop that distills lessons from those episodes into a continually-improving harness carried forward into future tasks.

Read the brief

Earlier entries

  1. 48 Claws
  2. 47 Personal Agent Protocol
  3. 46 WebMCP
  4. 45 Agent-scale version control
  5. 44 Advisor pattern
  6. 43 Cross-agent privilege escalation
  7. 42 Skill engineering
  8. 41 MCP Skills Extension
  9. 40 Recursive language models
  10. 39 Context plumbing
  11. 38 Opaque recurrence
  12. 37 Legal Context Protocol
  13. 36 Inoculation prompting
  14. 35 Agentic engineering
  15. 34 System One models
  16. 33 Eval engineering
  17. 32 Preserved thinking
  18. 31 Know Your Agent (KYA)
  19. 30 Harness-managed virtual memory
  20. 29 Meta-harness
  21. 28 Enterprise-Managed Authorization
  22. 27 Metagaming
  23. 26 Attention interface
  24. 25 Harness engineering
  25. 24 Thin agents
  26. 23 Governance decay
  27. 22 Intent engineering
  28. 21 Graph engineering
  29. 20 Ontology-driven guardrails
  30. 19 Malicious agent skills
  31. 18 Vibe-proving
  32. 17 MCP extensions framework
  33. 16 Meat proxy
  34. 15 Double-blind AI evaluations
  35. 14 Managed agents
  36. 13 Model Hardware Standard
  37. 12 MCP Tasks
  38. 11 Agent behavioral contracts
  39. 10 Client ID Metadata Documents (CIMD)
  40. 09 Multi round-trip requests (MRTR)
  41. 08 Introspection adapters
  42. 07 J-Space
  43. 06 Natural language autoencoders
  44. 05 Loop engineering
  45. 04 MCP Apps
  46. 03 Agent sprawl
  47. 02 Compressed sparse attention
  48. 01 Cryptographic context injection