Every agent framework teaches you how to build an agent. None teach you how to keep one alive in production. That gap has a name now.
In 2024, we learned to build AI agents. In 2025, we learned to orchestrate them. In 2026, we're learning something harder: they fail in ways no traditional software fails, and none of our existing tools can stop them.
This isn't a tooling problem. It's a discipline gap. We have frontend engineering, backend engineering, platform engineering, reliability engineering, security engineering — each with its own principles, patterns, and tools. But when an AI agent runs in production, who owns the fact that it's stuck in a loop? Who owns the fact that it just echoed an API key into a log file? Who owns the fact that it's been re-reading the same file for 12 turns while the context window fills up?
Nobody does. Because the discipline that answers those questions doesn't have a name yet.
It does now. Harness engineering.
