Harness Engineering: Designing the Operating Layer for Reliable Agents
Aishwarya Naresh Reganti
AI Founder & Advisor to F500s | Ex-AWS
Kiriti Badam
Applied AI @ OpenAI Codex | Ex-Google
Learn harness engineering from experts building harnesses at the frontier!
As frontier models converge, the model is rarely what separates a reliable agent from a broken one.
The harness is the operating layer around the model that manages its context, memory, tools, autonomy, and checks. It is where serious teams are investing right now, and far more than a loop over tool calls.
This course teaches that layer as a set of configurable knobs you learn to set, then customize for your own domain. You will build your own harness and customize a popular open-source one for your use case, learning levers that transfer to any tool.
🚨 Current Offers:
Inaugural 25% off with "EARLY25"
AI Builder Bundle: Get this course free with our flagship Problem First AI course & other courses. Details here
You can also upgrade to our 1-year AI Builder Pass, which includes unlimited retakes, access to all our other courses, live sessions and partner credits from companies like Vapi AI, Arize, Cursor, Deepgram, Composio, Mem0, OpenAI, and more! Register for this course, and we’ll send you upgrade details over email.
What you’ll learn
Move from using agent frameworks to engineering and customizing the harness layer that makes agents reliable.
Map every lever a harness turns: loop, context, memory, autonomy, delegation, verification, observability.
Learn the failure each lever prevents: context rot, tool sprawl, compounding sub-agent error.
Build a mental model that transfers to any framework or model.
Dissect layers of context window with a budget: compaction, clearing, and offloading without losing coherence.
How do agents like Codex and Claude carry on really long conversations and tasks.
Add the control, state, and gates a bare plan-act-observe loop lacks (stop conditions, step and token budgets).
Actually implement how skills and plugins via progressive disclosure and just-in-time loading works in a harness.
Delegate for context isolation, specialization, or parallelism. Architecture shouldn't define this, user query should.
Understand how learning models like GPT 5.6, Fable delegate in their harnesses.
Decide what runs automatically and what needs human approval (allowlists, command approval).
Learn how sandboxing, execution environment etc. limit what agent can touch.
Implement objective verification: how features like /goal and /loop work, and when to use them.
Use tracing to find where harnesses break, and track improvement metrics.
Learn directly from Aishwarya & Kiriti
Aishwarya Naresh Reganti
AI Founder & Advisor to F500s | Ex-AWS
Kiriti Badam
Applied AI Lead | AI Advisor | Ex-Google
Who this course is for
Technical product managers directing agent work who need to reason precisely about autonomy, reliability, cost, and control tradeoffs.
Engineers building agents who want to move from wiring up a framework to deliberately engineering the harness underneath.
Founders and builders shipping agent products who want the harness to be a durable advantage rather than an afterthought.
Prerequisites
Basic familiarity with coding or the willingness to learn basic commands.
You will be building your own AI harness with the help of coding agents and Python libraries.
What's included
Live sessions
Learn directly from Aishwarya Naresh Reganti & Kiriti Badam in a real-time, interactive format.
Lifetime access
Go back to course content and recordings whenever you need to.
Community of peers
Our alums are product and engineering leaders from some of the best companies: Amazon, Anthropic, Databricks, Google, Snowflake, Notion, Meta, Microsoft and 130+ other companies
Certificate of completion
Share your new skills with your employer or on LinkedIn.
Direct Slack Access w/ Instructors
All students will be part of our Slack community where they can interact with the instructors
Maven Guarantee
Your purchase is backed by the Maven Guarantee.
Course syllabus
6 live sessions • 8 lessons
Week 1
Week 1: Anatomy of harness and building one from scratch
Sep
8
Lecture 1: Foundations of harness engineering
Sep
10
Week 1: Office Hours (US/EU/UK Friendly)
Sep
12
Week 1: Office Hours (US/APAC Friendly)
[Build] Assignment 1: Build your own harness
Week 2
Week 2: Going Deeper and Enterprise Best Practices
Sep
15
Lecture 2: Advanced Harness Engineering
Sep
17
Week 2: Office Hours (US/EU/UK Friendly)
Sep
19
Week 2: Office Hours (US/APAC Friendly)
[Build] Assignment 2: Customize a Production Harness for Your Domain
Schedule
Live sessions
4 hrs / week
Tue, Sep 8
4:00 PM—5:30 PM (UTC)
Thu, Sep 10
3:00 PM—4:00 PM (UTC)
Sat, Sep 12
1:00 AM—2:00 AM (UTC)
Projects
2-5 hrs / week
Async content
1-3 hrs / week
Frequently asked questions
Maven for Teams
Reimbursement
Get your company to pay
Everything L&D needs: email template, receipts, and certificate of completion.
Get reimbursedTeam discount
Learn with your teammates
Save 20%+ when 2 or more teammates enroll in the same cohort.
Save 20%+ with a teamPrivate cohort
Run a cohort for your org
A dedicated cohort with a custom schedule and curriculum, tailored to your team.
Book a private cohort$1,500
USD