# Brendan Cody-Kenny: I made a harness engineering glossary with cross-field names and references.

Technical Due Diligence for Software M&A https://sub.xiliary.com/p/brendancodykenny

### 2026-10-15 published #coding-agents #genetic-programming #harness-engineering #sbse
I made a harness engineering glossary with cross-field names and references.

> In their own words:
> Imagine my surprise after reading decades of search-based software engineering, program synthesis, genetic programming research to see everyone using the term harness engineering. The same issues are appearing.

- I map hillclimbing a prompt against an eval to hill climbing, and reward hacking to overfitting to the test suite.
- I map a codebase where no small change helps to a local optimum, called premature convergence in genetic programming.
- I found no settled terms for how much to leave unchecked or for code nobody understands. Osmani calls them back pressure and comprehension debt.
- I take on harness engineering work.
- https://codykenb.github.io/glossary/

https://sub.xiliary.com/p/brendancodykenny/posts/71/i-made-a-harness-engineering-glossary-with-cross-field-names