Notable quotes

On who the talk is for

"I'm here today at a developer focused conference to talk about non-developers." — Intro

"A lot of the origination of that context comes from non-developments. It comes from product and design teams." — Intro

On the evolution of methodology

"We've seen the methodology we use to do that evolving from spectrum development where we write up front all the context that the agent's going to need in order to get the test done. To context engineering, just kind of where we are just now. And have it evolving into harness engineer. Ing." — Intro

On skills

"The fact that the markdown file is so flexible and adaptable makes it a natural place to be able to put code based context." — Intro

"It lives within the repo, that it's managed, it's [versioned] and can be subject to evaluations and tests and all that good stuff that comes with the harness." — Intro

On the export-button failure mode

"The agent got one thing wrong. It actually ended up using a generic react button component that lived within the code base and not the more specific export button component." — Worked example part 1

"Encoded within that export button component are the accessibility requirements that this organization adheres to, interaction patterns that make sense for this kind of async." — Worked example part 1

"As far as the harness was [concerned], everything went smoothly." — Worked example part 1

On the harness-as-wrapping-layer model

"The way I think about aging harnesses is that it's a layer that wraps the code base itself … The product and design context I see existing in this layer surrounding the harness, at least right now." — Where product/design context fits

"This data doesn't live in the code base by design. It lives in the third party tools, that product managers and designers and so on are using day to day." — Where product/design context fits

On drift

"The code base isn't falling increasingly out of sync with what's going on in product and design Act. And the agent is still producing features using the outdated design system." — Drift example

"We're also going to find ourselves in the situation where the app itself has a whole bunch of components. The design team know nothing about." — Challenge 2

On why MCP alone isn't enough

"It is constantly up to date. There's never really a definition of done there." — MCP section

"The evals and things like that that we're setting up on the skills and the context in the code base is now reliant on third party context that's constantly changing." — MCP section

On Code Connect lessons

"In enterprises there are entire teams who sole job is to make sure that that connection is up to date." — Lessons

"Sometimes it's not desirable actually to keep the two completely in sync." — Lessons

"Figma as an organization is very protective of its design system IP. It didn't just want to give away the keys to the house." — Lessons

On the three+ evolution directions

"Another option is the idea that there is an agent that sits between the third party product and design context. And the harness agent." — Evolution directions

"Perhaps just gets swallowed by the repo and we'll see it making inroads into it and then being able to be managed by the harness directly." — Evolution directions

"We as non-developers are increasingly looking like developers." — Evolution directions

"Each of the different roles within product team will have their own agent and their own harness. And these harnesses are going to have to talk to each other." — Sneaky fourth direction

On knowing when not to build

"It can be just as valuable for a product manager to know when not to build something than to just look at a backlog as a to-do list that we just need to throw agents out and work through." — PM example

On the path forward (from Q&A)

"We need to figure out which design context is signal versus noise. And perhaps have the agents to help us decipher that." — Q&A

"We need to apply all the same principles with code based context to product and design context. With that extra layer of difficulty that comes with that because of it being external." — Q&A