Harness Engineering is not Enough: Why Software Factories Fail — Dex Horthy, HumanLayer
Harness engineering cannot fix AI coding quality failures rooted in model training limitations.
“companies that should not be having outages because of coding agents are having outages due to coding agent mishaps”
Dex Horthy argues that the 'software factory' model of AI-generated code is producing measurable harm: more production incidents, degraded PR review quality, and codebases deteriorating faster than before. He challenges the industry narrative that prompt engineering and harness improvements are sufficient, asserting the root cause is a model training problem that no amount of loop engineering can fix. This is a timely counterweight to the vibe-coding hype cycle, grounded in data from Faros AI on post-January 2025 code quality metrics.