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concepts → System

System

Agent harness

also called scaffolding · harness

decade13 connections

every decision you can make without retraining the model — loop, context, tools, memory

Where it sits

The prism has six jobs across and eight layers down. Its primary cell isact × L6. Hatched cells cannot exist — a GPU does not learn, an institution does not infer.

Overlays: Efficiency, cost & energy.

What must come first — and what it unlocks

Left to right is reading order, derived from the prerequisite_of edges. Nothing here is hand-ordered: the diagram is the graph.

AgentAgent harnessnothing depends on it yet — a leaf in the reading order

Before it: Agent

What kind of thing it is — and what it is made of

It is part of: Agent.

It is made of: Sandbox, Agent loop, Context window, Orchestration, Human in the loop, Observability, Guardrail, Harness engineering, Context management.

Where to read it

The chapter that introduces it, and any chapter that uses it again.

52The Harnessact 11 · Beyond Text

Where it comes from

standardModel Context Protocol SpecificationAnthropic · 2024

Every connection

All 13 edges touching this node, grouped by relation family — the sections above are highlights from this list. Colours match the relation families inthe atlas.

Structure · 10
is part ofAgentSystem
has as a partSandboxMechanism
has as a partAgent loopMechanism
has as a partContext windowProperty
has as a partOrchestrationSystem
has as a partHuman in the loopMechanism
has as a partObservabilityField
has as a partGuardrailMechanism
has as a partHarness engineeringField
has as a partContext managementMechanism
Order · 1
requiresAgentSystem
Flow · 2
is used byAgentSystem
usesTool useMechanism

This page is a projection of one node in src/data/concepts.ts. It has no prose file of its own — 230 declared edges produce all 236 of these pages. Edit an edge and both endpoints change.