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Reading / 2026-05/2026-05-19t221035-effective-harnesses-for-long-running-agents

Effective Harnesses for Long-Running Agents

Anthropic engineers describe a two-agent harness — an initializer that scaffolds a feature list, git repo, and progress file, plus an incremental coding agent — that enables Claude to make consistent progress across many context windows without losing state.

May 19, 2026 · tech · Justin Young, Anthropic

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Topics

  • llm-agents
  • agentic-workflows
  • context-engineering
  • llm-orchestration
  • software-engineering

Cited by

  • Agentic workflows

    Systems where AI agents execute multi-step tasks autonomously, raising interconnected questions about harness architecture, state management, reliability engineering, human oversight, and the organizational context those agents operate within.

  • Context engineering

    Context engineering is the practice of deliberately constructing what an LLM receives in its context window — structuring, compressing, persisting, and retrieving information so agents produce reliable output across tasks and sessions.

  • LLM Agents

    LLM agents are software systems that pair a language model with tools, memory, and control flow to accomplish multi-step tasks autonomously; the emerging consensus is that reliability requires engineering constraints, not better prompts.

  • LLM orchestration

    LLM orchestration covers the control structures, harness designs, and coordination patterns that govern how language models are invoked, sequenced, and supervised — whether in single-agent loops or across distributed multi-agent pipelines.

  • Software engineering

    Software engineering spans craft, process, and judgment — how code is structured, tested, reviewed, deployed, and maintained — and the sources collected here collectively interrogate each layer as AI tooling reshapes who does what and why.

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