SPEAKER
Ian Johnson
Staff Engineer · Parento
Ian Johnson is a staff software engineer at Parento and the author of Harness Engineering, a body of work on the machinery and the standards that keep non-deterministic agents inside a band you can ship. He wrote Keystone, the open-source tool this session maps its primitives onto so that nothing taught here is tied to one vendor, and runs Fulcorum, a video course platform for agentic engineering. He works on harness and charter engineering: the engine that runs an agent, and the rules it reads before it writes a line. Based outside Austin, Texas.
Upcoming sessions
See complete program2 November
1:40 PM · 90 min
The Only Variable: Change Nothing but the Charter, and Measure What Moved
Everyone tells you to write a CLAUDE.md. Nobody shows you what it buys, because nobody measures it. Here you measure it, on your laptop, three times.
You get a repository you did not write, three eras deep, where the correct code is outnumbered ten to one. You give your agent one ticket with no charter and watch it copy the worst thing in the codebase. Then you add four guardrails one at a time, probe each on its own, and re-run the same ticket after each.
The deliverable is a matrix: eight checks a machine can settle, and one it cannot, which stays a question mark until a reviewer reads the diff. The hole in the scorecard is the whole point.
