Your Agent Didn't Fail. Your Harness Did. — Vinoth Govindarajan, OpenAI
Most production agent failures are harness failures, not model failures
“Silent success gives you a lie.”
An OpenAI infrastructure engineer argues that the dominant failure mode in production agents is not model quality but harness design—specifically 'silent success,' where user-visible output looks correct while durable state is never written. The core prescription is a three-part contract: own the state, order the mutation, and prove the action with receipts rather than transcripts. This reframes agent debugging away from prompt engineering toward distributed systems reliability thinking.