Harness Engineering Foundation Course
10 modules · 50 questions · 80% to pass · Complete the test to earn your certificate.
Curriculum
1. Introduction to Harness Engineering
What is a harness? The role of execution infrastructure in autonomous agent systems. Harness vs. agent: separation of concerns. Core design principles.
2. Supervisor Loop Design
Architecture of the Ralph supervisor loop. Goal decomposition, iteration management, and termination conditions. Fresh-session vs. persistent-session modes.
3. Verification & Validation
Automated verification commands. Compilation checks, test runners, linters, and custom assertions. Integrating verification into the agent workflow.
4. Checkpointing & Resumability
State persistence strategies. Session serialization, checkpoint files, and recovery flows. Handling partial completion and mid-task failures.
5. Workspace & Worktree Isolation
Git worktree-based isolation. Creating, switching, and pruning worktrees. Ensuring clean environments for each task. Parallel task execution without interference.
6. Tool Runtime & Permission Models
Designing a secure tool execution runtime. Shell execution, file I/O, browser control, and search. Permission levels: allow, deny, ask. Sandboxing strategies.
7. Session & Context Management
Session lifecycle: create, save, resume, list. Context window budgeting and history summarization. Managing long-running conversations efficiently.
8. Gateway & Channel Routing
HTTP gateway daemon design. Routing messages from Slack, Discord, Telegram to the agent. Deterministic routing, bindings, and multi-channel support.
9. Scheduling & Automation
Cron-based task scheduling. Periodic maintenance operations. Automated backup, checkpoint, and cleanup routines. Integrating with external schedulers.
10. Production Hardening & Monitoring
Resource limits, rate limiting, and circuit breakers. Logging, tracing, and observability. Stress testing the harness. Deployment patterns and scaling considerations.
Final Assessment
Answer all 50 questions. Each correct answer is worth 2 points. Minimum passing score: 80% (40/50 correct).