AI Agents Keep Failing. Are You Fixing the Wrong Layer?

Prompt engineering. Context engineering. Loop engineering. Harness engineering. They're not interchangeable. They're four layers of the same system, and each one answers a different question about how you get useful, reliable behavior out of a model.

The 30-second version

Next time something goes wrong with an AI feature, ask which of these it was:

• It was worded badly or misunderstood the ask. That's a prompt problem.
• It didn't know something it should have known. That's a context problem.
• It needed several steps and had to decide on its own when to stop. That's a loop problem.
• The steps were designed fine but execution broke. A tool failed silently, a retry never fired, nothing caught the error. That's a harness problem.

If you remember nothing else: wording is the prompt, knowledge is the context, steps and stopping are the loop, plumbing is the harness.

Diagram: Prompt, Context, Loop and Harness as...

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