The Hour That Broke the Loop

Spent an hour asking an agent to do one thing. Simple thing. It kept doing adjacent things. Close, but wrong. Correcting it produced a different wrong. The loop didn't end — it just changed shape.

At some point the frustration shifted. Not into giving up. Into a quieter question: what would it look like if I could define exactly what runs, in what order, under what conditions?

Not "better prompting." Not more context. Actual structure. Constraints I set, not ones the model infers.

That's the moment the harness started existing — not as a plan, but as a question I couldn't stop asking.

The tool didn't fail. It just made the missing design visible.