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Beyond the Harness: A Journey Towards Adaptative Engineering - Rajiv Chandegra, Annicha Labs
Takeaway
Match orchestration to the problem's stability, and consider adaptive structures when predefined workflows cannot accommodate real-world change.
Summary
- Chandegra describes fixed agent harnesses as predefined roles, tools, prompts, memory rules, and handoffs that produce reliable, auditable workflows.
- He argues that rapidly improving models and messy interactions among agents, people, institutions, and physical systems make static harnesses increasingly brittle.
- Adaptive engineering is proposed as a design philosophy in which engineers set constraints while runtime structures emerge, stabilize, change, and dissolve.
- The talk frames a tradeoff between predictable factory-like execution for fixed problems and the variation needed to discover novel responses to changing problems.
agent-harnessesadaptive-systemsorchestration
Original description
Building products has been commoditised. As AI models grow more capable, the real opportunity shifts to the hard problems — the big, messy, tangled challenges of the physical and social world. That, after all, is the engineer's true job: to solve problems. But our current paradigm leans on fixed harnesses - predetermined structures imposed on the problem. In a world of complex, shifting systems, that rigidity becomes a liability. We need harnesses that adapt in real time, the way a great leader reads and responds to a changing team. This is adaptive engineering, and it is where the next frontier lies. This talk traces the limits of today's engineering paradigm, draws on complexity science to examine how complex systems behave in the natural and social world, and explores the philosophy and practice of adaptive engineering as what comes next. Speakers: Rajiv Chandegra (Annicha Labs): Rajiv is a practicing medical doctor and director of Annicha Labs - a firm dedicated to exploring the application of technology for complex challenges in the real world. X/Twitter: @rajivchandegra LinkedIn: / rajivchandegra