AI Engineer · July 26, 2026

Your Agent Didn't Fail. Your Harness Did. — Vinoth Govindarajan, OpenAI

video AI Engineering Model Evaluation Prompt Engineering

Your Agent Didn't Fail. Your Harness Did. — Vinoth Govindarajan, OpenAI video thumbnail

Why it matters

Two runs touch the same session, the second write silently erases the first, and the agent keeps answering with total confidence from stale state. Nothing crashed and the model did not hallucinate, so this is a harness failure, the kind that lives in the system around the model rather than in the weights.

My takeaway: Your Agent Didn't Fail. Your Harness Did. — Vinoth Govindarajan, OpenAI is an agent-security signal. The practical read is that autonomy, memory, tool permissions, and third-party integrations are the control surface that needs threat modeling and monitoring.

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