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Cover image for The AI Harness: why your AI coding agent is only as smart as the repo you put it in

The AI Harness: why your AI coding agent is only as smart as the repo you put it in

Louai Boumediene on May 02, 2026

Hi. I am an engineer at Activepieces, an open source automation platform (think Zapier, but you can self host it and read the source code). I write...
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Louai Boumediene

Very Helpful!!

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Anmol Baranwal

this is great. I was just reading about agent harness on langchain blog -- learning about it since the last week.

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CapeStart

AI doesn’t magically understand your codebase. Tests, naming, architecture, and documentation are the real instruction layer.

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John Cotterell

I'm not at 1.9m LOC yet, more like 100k and one developer, but it's reached the point where I need to rethink my strategy, a simple guidelines.md has served me well but it's no longer enough.
Specialised subagents looks like a really good idea.
But there's lots of great advice here.

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Bnklf Houda

I’m really happy to see you back with new blogs! I love how you organize them—they’re both fun and clear, and the information really stands out. Big applause for the structure of the blog and even the title, AI Harness.

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Mykola Kondratiuk

hit this with our biggest repo - suggestions were technically valid but wrong for our patterns. the fix was not prompt engineering, it was 3 days of context doc cleanup. repo hygiene as AI prep work is underrated.

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Said

Thank you very much now i have motivation to go and buy subscription.

I promised myself by the end if the day I would have AI subscription but I had no idea what I would do with it beside well writing same things I do now with free tier on the browser.

I intend to do creative learning so i must adjust the harness to do more planning than yours.

I have found that system design heavy prompt generate better and easier to use code and its easier to locate what need to be fixed for example if I say "decoupled and modular with self explanatory naming convention".

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Ian Johnson

Great post! I just released a Claude Code plugin to do this: dev.to/tacoda/introducing-bridle-a...
Here's the repo (open to create issues to improve): github.com/tacoda/bridle
I like a lot of what you have in here. Would love to collaborate with you on this!

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Bnklf Houda

I feel like part of the struggle isn’t even technical. For a long time, we were made to feel like using AI is cheating or doing something wrong, so a lot of us held back. Now it’s more about unlearning that mindset and actually embracing it as a tool.

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David

extremely detailed

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Bnklf Houda

Keep going 👏

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Spencer Pauly

And only as smart as the services you connect it to. That's why I built querybear.com. To connect your coding agents to your DB safely.

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obilom-emmanuel

Indeed helpful

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Paul Newell

Tests are the secret sauce in the mix.

Too many treat them as an afterthought.