Why agent harnesses fail inside cloud-native systems

Agent harnesses can dramatically improve coding-agent performance, but only when they provide strong feedback loops.

That feedback is easy to add for local apps, yet much harder for cloud-native and microservices-based systems.

In distributed software, real validation depends on live services, state, and runtime behavior, not just static code checks.

The article argues that agent success is shaped as much by the surrounding system and runtime signals as by the model itself.