Harness Engineering: How to Build a Software Factory — Dru Knox, Tessl
Tessl proposes 'harness engineering' as a new discipline for building agent-powered software factories
“a software factory is any agent-based system where all of the end product you build and deliver to users is created by agents”
Drew Knox from Tessl introduced 'harness engineering' as a new core discipline for teams scaling beyond individual coding agents toward fully autonomous software factories. A software factory is defined as an agent-based system where all deliverables are produced by agents while dev teams shift focus to building and improving the factory itself. The talk targets practitioners already comfortable with multi-session coding agents and looking to scale output quality and autonomy systematically.