Practical writing on Context Engineering, Agent Architecture, and Human-AI Collaboration Systems — from real-world experiments building AI-native products and teams.
"The model is public infrastructure. Your context is the moat."
Harness Engineering is the discipline of designing everything that sits between a frontier model and a real outcome: context pipelines, tool orchestration, memory architecture, agent loops, skill systems, organizational workflows, and the human-AI collaboration patterns that make it all work.
Most teams obsess over which model to use. The teams that actually win obsess over their harness.
This repository collects my ongoing thinking and experiments at the intersection of:
- Context Engineering — how to make implicit knowledge explicit, testable, and evolvable
- Agent Architecture — how to design systems where humans and agents form effective working units
- Organizational Harness — how to restructure teams around agents as the unit of work, not people
| Title | Core Idea | Read |
|---|---|---|
| It's Not the Model. It's the Context. | Context failures are silent. Teams blame the model when they should debug the context. Introduces the Context Maturity Ladder (5 levels) and the case for eval-driven context development. | articles/en/context-not-model.md |
| AI Coding's Harness Engineering Guide | Guides (feedforward) raise the probability an agent gets it right the first time. Sensors (feedback) help it self-correct. The critical rule: if a constraint can be enforced computationally, never delegate it to an LLM. Maps the full harness lifecycle from pre-commit to continuous drift detection. | AI Coding's Harness Engineering Guide |
| Organizational Practice and Reflections by Harness | Field notes from restructuring a team at Meituan around agents as the primary work unit. Context is the organizational foundation — agents need the same information density as humans to participate in real thinking. The unexpected finding: AI doesn't make people's work easier. It makes people more expensive. | Organizational Practice and Reflections by Harness |
I'm Yibo Zhao — a product builder and AI practitioner based in Beijing.
Background: 6 years leading innovation businesses at Meituan (China's leading local services platform) + 5 years as a startup co-founder. For the past two years I've been running hands-on experiments with AI-native team structures, context engineering, and agent-centric organizational design.
- 📬 zhao1bo@gmail.com
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- Discussion on X → It's Not the Model. It's the Context.