The continuous, human-gated activity of keeping an agent's harness (skills, rules, prompts, documentation) aligned with the operator's evolving intent. Three properties hold simultaneously: the target is operator intent, itself evolving (bidirectional — the loop's own running moves the target); the loop is human-gated; and the alignment is continuous, sustained through a recurring cycle rather than configured once. Its failure mode is harness drift: the gradual uncoupling of the harness from operator intent when the cycle does not run, named in lineage with architectural drift (Perry & Wolf 1992), practical drift (Snook 2000), and agent drift (Rath 2026). It extends intent alignment (Christiano 2018) from behavior to the artifacts that shape behavior, and across time.
Coined by Tatsuya Shimomoto (shimo4228) within the Agent Knowledge Cycle research line (ADR-0017 and the companion position paper), which records the term's lineage against prior drift coinages and notes one unrelated prior use of the phrase 'harness drift' in a different, benchmark-comparability sense.
The continuous, human-gated activity of keeping an agent's harness (skills, rules, prompts, documentation) aligned with the operator's evolving intent — bidirectional, human-gated, and continuous.
Harness alignment's failure mode: the gradual uncoupling of the harness from operator intent when the cycle does not run. It is the artifact-side layer of failure; its human-side twin is the failure twin (gate complacency, deskilling, delegation-feedback divergence).
Tatsuya Shimomoto (shimo4228), in AKC ADR-0017 and the companion position paper (doi:10.5281/zenodo.20578272), with an explicit lineage audit against prior drift coinages.
エージェントの harness (skills, rules, prompts, documentation) を、operator の進化し続ける intent に整合させ続ける、継続的で human-gated な活動。3 つの性質が同時に成り立つ: 対象は operator intent であり、それ自体が進化する (bidirectional — ループが回ること自体が target を動かす); ループは human-gated である; 整合は継続的で、一度の設定ではなく繰り返されるサイクルで維持される。その失敗モードが harness drift: サイクルが回らないときに harness が operator intent から徐々に uncouple していくこと。architectural drift (Perry & Wolf 1992)、practical drift (Snook 2000)、agent drift (Rath 2026) の系譜に置いて命名された。intent alignment (Christiano 2018) を、行動から行動を形づくる artifact へ、そして時間軸へ拡張する。