The harness as a living system
Template hygiene, separating what generalizes from what was engagement-specific, versioning your agents, and measuring yourself without cargo-cult metrics.
- Separate the reusable harness from the engagement-specific artifacts
- Version agent definitions so their behavior is diffable over time
- Measure the harness by outcomes, not by activity
The deal is done, but the customer taught you things that outlive it — which discovery questions actually surfaced pain, which demo beats landed, which objections Security raised. Those lessons belong in the template, not in your memory. The engagement is over; the harness it produced is not.
Keeping a template clean is a discipline of separation. What generalizes — the agents, the skills, the instruction stack — stays. What was engagement-specific — the dossier, the fabricated data, the entity model tuned to Contoso’s sentences — goes. The test for each file is one question: would I want this, unchanged, at the start of a different deal? If yes, it is harness; if no, it is engagement, and it does not belong in the template.
Version the agent definitions like the code they are. When you tighten the fact-checker’s rules or narrow the operator’s tools, that is a diff worth keeping, because six months from now you will want to know why an agent behaves the way it does — and a commit history answers that.
Measuring without cargo cults
You can measure a harness honestly or you can measure it to feel productive. The honest metrics are outcomes the harness exists to speed up: time-to-dossier, time-to-demo-environment, rehearsal pass rate. The cargo-cult metrics are activity — prompts written, agents owned, hours in the editor — which reward motion over result and quietly encourage you to build tooling you do not need. If a number does not correspond to a faster or more reliable engagement, do not track it.
In the field
Take a finished engagement repo and split it in two: a template/ with only what
generalizes, and an archive with the engagement-specific artifacts. Commit the
template. The next deal starts from it.