The industry keeps renaming this work: first prompt engineering, then context
engineering, now harness engineering. Each name showed up a year or two after I was
already living in it. Here is the whole of it, in plain words.
Context Engineering
Deciding what the model sees before it answers: the right information, in the
right shape, at the right moment.
ContextOverflow is my public thesis on it. Behind it sits the private practice — a
layered memory system that survives every reset.
Stack: corpus-as-git, Zod schemas, TF-IDF intent classification, Jina embeddings
Harness Engineering
The operational layer around the model — tools, memory, permissions, guardrails —
that makes an agent dependable.
Mine is built like infrastructure: agents ask a human before anything
irreversible, watchdogs heal the system while I sleep, and the build itself
refuses to ship private context.
Stack: systemd, tmux, asyncio approval gates, Telegram human-in-the-loop, SHA-256 privacy scanning
MCP Engineering
MCP is the USB-C of AI — one standard port that lets any assistant plug into any
tool or data source.
I build the ports: public servers like ContextOverflow's, and private ones that
put an entire ad operation at an AI's fingertips — stateless or stateful as the
job demands.
Stack: TypeScript, Python FastMCP, Streamable HTTP, Durable Objects
Edge: Cloudflare Workers, Pages, KV, Analytics Engine
Graph Engineering
Knowledge graphs give an AI a memory that works like yours — facts connected to
facts, each stamped with when it was true and when it was learned.
I run separate graphs for episodes, structured knowledge, and emotion, federated
so an answer can always show where it came from.
Stack: Neo4j, Graphiti, Cypher, bi-temporal modeling, embedding pipelines
Agent Orchestration
A coordinated team of AI specialists, each with its own role and its own model —
and a supervisor keeping them honest.
My production team runs analytical, creative, and adversarial agents against each
other before anything reaches a human.
Stack: DSPy, ReAct + Chain-of-Thought modules, OpenRouter multi-model routing, Pydantic contracts
Voice & Affective Interfaces
Voice AI that hears the emotion, not just the words.
I've been running an empathic voice line to my own assistant since spring — it
tracks the feeling of a conversation in real time and remembers how it went, not
just what was said.
Stack: Hume EVI, real-time emotion clustering, numpy hot paths, FastAPI streaming