{
  "id": 9328645,
  "title": "I stopped prompting and started building a harness",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/23/i-stopped-prompting-and-started-building-a-harness",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-09-23T11:37:27.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/zemant91/i-stopped-prompting-and-started-building-a-harness-2hg2"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "For several months, the author has been utilizing AI agents in their React Native work. They have noticed that they were repeating the same instructions, such as how to set up projects, perform refactoring, and check before shipping. To streamline this process, they created a harness consisting of skills and agents that encode their work process. This harness is currently in alpha and is used daily on the author's own projects. The harness is built as a Claude Code plugin in its own Git repository, with each skill and agent called using an \"rnmh:\" prefix. The author outlines the different components of the harness, including project bootstrap, refactoring, cross-project consistency, design-to-code, architecture review, testing, and test coverage, as well as diagnostics, release checklist, security review, and RN upgrades. The author shares their experience using the refactoring agent on a side project, which helped to simplify a long function by extracting components, functions, and dead code. The author emphasizes the importance of narrow skills over one giant prompt and the need for agents to act, not just advise. They also mention the challenge of understanding the project and the usefulness of tools like graphify in helping agents navigate the codebase. The author plans to make the harness available to other React Native developers and welcomes feedback on their toolkit.",
  "summary": "For the last few months I've been using AI agents in almost every part of my React Native work. At some point I noticed I was writing the same instructions over and over: how I want projects set up, what a good refactoring looks like, what to check before shipping. Every new session started from zero. So I started turning those instructions into a harness: a set of skills and agents that encode…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}