Tejas Kumar
Free Lesson

What Is an Agent Harness? Build One From Scratch

60 min
Nov 18, 2026 10:30 AM

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What you'll learn

The 6 parts of an agent harness

Name the tool registry, model, context management, guardrails, loop and verify step, and what each does.

Guardrails the model can't talk its way past

Add iteration and context limits in code, so a confused agent can't run forever or overflow its context.

Verification that catches a lying agent

Check an agent's trace in plain code and let a failed check overrule its claim of success.

Why this topic matters

Most AI agents fail the same way: they report success they did not achieve. Better prompts and bigger models rarely fix it. The harness around the model does. In 1 hour you will watch an agent go from lying about a task to completing it, with the same model and prompt, and leave knowing the 6 parts of a harness and how to add guardrails and verification to your own agents.

You'll learn from

Tejas Kumar

Tejas Kumar

AI Engineer at IBM, best selling O'Reilly author, 80 recorded talks

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