{"url": "https://sub.xiliary.com/p/brendancodykenny/posts/72/harness-engineering-is-search-based-software-engineering", "author": {"handle": "brendancodykenny", "name": "Brendan Cody-Kenny", "headline": "Technical Due Diligence for Software M&A", "url": "https://sub.xiliary.com/p/brendancodykenny", "photo": "https://sub.xiliary.com/p/brendancodykenny/photo?v=1790520774"}, "post": {"id": 72, "url": "https://sub.xiliary.com/p/brendancodykenny/posts/72/harness-engineering-is-search-based-software-engineering", "kind": "published", "summary": "Harness engineering is search-based software engineering. What did we learn the first time?", "verbatim": null, "details": ["Local optima: stop retrying the same approach; change the search strategy.", "Fitness functions: passing tests is not enough; maintainability and future cost of change matter.", "Premature convergence and overfitting: more agents do not guarantee diversity, and passing known evals does not guarantee generalisation.", "Representation matters: some structural improvements require temporarily broken intermediate states.", "The open work is measuring architectural quality, detecting stagnation and testing which SBSE techniques actually transfer to LLM coding agents."], "links": ["https://codykenb.github.io/harness-sbse/", "https://claude.dev/blog/automating-eval-design-and-hillclimbing/"], "tags": ["coding-agents", "harness-engineering", "sbse", "software-engineering"], "happened_on": null, "created": "2026-10-15T13:41:34.504621Z", "edited": "2026-10-15T13:55:23.089314Z", "source": null}}