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Context vs Memory vs Harness engineering explained in 40 sec — 💡These 3 disciplines are core to building agents that ...
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Context vs Memory vs Harness engineering explained in 40 sec — 💡These 3 disciplines are core to building agents that ...
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Context vs Memory vs Harness engineering explained in 40 seconds by Richmond Alake ⚡️ — @lindavivah; demonstrates AI agents.
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Context vs Memory vs Harness engineering explained in 40 seconds by Richmond Alake ⚡️
💡These 3 disciplines are core to building agents that can actually remember and reason over time
Most agents work well within a single session but lose everything the moment it ends. Memory engineering treats long-term memory as first-class infrastructure.
Richmond Alake (Director of AI DevEx at Oracle) walked me through all three in NYC🗽
✈️ I’m PSYCHED to be heading to an offsite with the Oracle developer team very soon to go even deeper on agent harnesses & excited to share learnings with y’all!
If you want to learn how to build memory-aware agents, Richmond has a free short DeepLearning.AI course in collaboration with Oracle that he co-taught with his colleague Nacho! 📚
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Transcript excerpt
What's the difference between context engineering, memory engineering, and harness engineering? That's a load of questions, but let me answer it very quickly. Context engineering is how you actually optimize the signals and noise ratio within the context window. So every information you put into the context window, you have to get every bank for your block. While memory engineering is how you actually implement systems that can learn. So, are you modeled the actual memory within the agents? Are you retrieving information? Are you forget information? Are you evolving information? Whereas harness engineering is everything around the agents and the LLM. So, it's the code, essentially. It's the scaffolding and the oprenulated structure of that scaffolding. That's harness engineering. Check out his course, by the way, on Deep Learning AI, all about agent memory. I'll link it below, and hello from New York again.
Appears in
- Guide: Why Your Agent Sucks: Architecture Patterns That Actually Work
- Deeper dive: Why Your Agent Sucks: Architecture Patterns That Actually Work
- Guide: The Claude Harness Pattern: Context, Memory, and Cognitive Scaffolding
- Deeper dive: The Claude Harness Pattern: Context, Memory, and Cognitive Scaffolding
- Guide: Beyond Prompting: Prompt Architecture as Engineering Discipline
- Deeper dive: Beyond Prompting: Prompt Architecture as Engineering Discipline
- Guide: Autonomous Agents in the Wild: What's Actually Working in 2026
- Deeper dive: Autonomous Agents in the Wild: What's Actually Working in 2026