The Agent Harness: Control Planes, Invariants, and Approval Boundaries for Production AI Agents
Reliable production agents need stronger structure than prompt-level guardrails: explicit state ownership, serialized concurrent mutations, scoped execution authority, and validation at the user-visible edge.
OpenAI’s Vinoth Govindarajan uses production case studies to frame the harness as a control plane around the model. The emphasis is operational: make state transitions explicit, constrain what tools can do, and verify the resulting action rather than trusting an agent’s internal reasoning. The page is a conference-session summary rather than a research paper, so implementation detail is limited.