From Prompt to Harness: The Complete Evolution of Enterprise Agent Engineering

Introduction to Alibaba This article systematically reviews the complete technological evolution path we have taken in building an enterprise-level AI Agent platform - starting from the innate constraints of the large model, going through three stages of Prompt engineering, Context engineering, and Harness engineering, and finally evolving into a five-layer architecture Agent operating system. Each level appears because the previous level encountered the ceiling. (The content of the article is based on the author's personal technical practice and independent thinking. It is intended to share experience and only represents personal opinions.) 1. The "innate constraints" of large models - why engineering is needed Before talking about any engineering methodology, we must first understand what the "opponent" we face is