Harness Engineering: Build the Loop Around Agents You Can Trust

The same model gives one team a flaky demo and another team a dependable agent. The difference is never the model. It's the harness: the system around the model that feeds it context, checks its output, blocks the catastrophic action, and turns every failure into a fix. Model quality is no longer your differentiator, because everyone rents the same models. Harness quality is, because you build it. This session is a live build of that harness, layer by layer. We start with a naked model call running a real agent task, and watch it fail: a wrong tool call, confident nonsense, a jailbreak. Then we wrap it: Same model at the end. Dependable agent. Reliability engineered, not prompted. Your speaker: Arvind, Co-Founder of The Gen Academy, where he helps professionals and teams learn to build production-grade AI systems. He brings a cross-company view of AI at scale from Microsoft, IBM, Adobe, and Ema. At Ema he worked as an AI Solutions Architect building agentic AI for enterprise transformation. Earlier, across Adobe, Microsoft, and IBM, he led data science and machine learning initiatives tied to real business impact and ARR growth. He is also Founder of Eikos Health, an agentic scheduling platform for doctor-led clinics. Arvind holds a Master's from Carnegie Mellon. His teaching emphasizes practical thinking, strong mental models, and translating AI concepts into production-ready solutions. Who it's for AI engineers shipping agents, especially if your lived experience is "the model is fine, my system is flaky." AI PMs who own agent quality will get the mental model even if they skip the code. What you leave with The harness mental model, the runnable open-source repo of the exact harness built live, and a Monday-morning starting order: trace first, then gates, then guardrails, then the loop. Bring A laptop if you want to run the repo with us. Star github.com/future-agi/future-agi and create a free account at app.futureagi.com before you arrive so you can follow from minute one. In partnership with The Gen Academy. Bengaluru Tech Week 2026 runs September 1-6, 2026 across Bengaluru. The week brings meetups, workshops, demos, founder gatherings, office hours, and community events into one citywide calendar for founders, engineers, designers, investors, operators, researchers, students, and communities building from Bengaluru for India and the world. Whether you're building your first startup, scaling a global product, exploring AI, investing in the future, or simply curious about what's next, BTW is where the conversations begin.