Prompt Engineering Is Dead. Long Live Harness Engineering.
I spent 3 months perfecting prompts. Then I deleted half of them. In late 2023 I had a directory called prompts/ with 47 carefully tuned templates. Few-shot examples, Chain-of-Thought scaffolds, a tiny ReAct loop I was very proud of. I'd A/B tested wording. I'd argued on Twitter about whether "Let's think step by step" still worked. By mid-2025 I deleted 23 of them. They weren't wrong. They just…
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