Why I call AI agent setups "rigs," not "agentic harnesses

A naming argument I keep making in AI work: the runnable system around an agent deserves a plain human name. The industry default, "agentic harness," is precise but heavy — awkward in a repo name, a standup, or a product conversation. I prefer "rig."

A rig is the assembled setup that lets something actually run: instructions and task boundaries, tools and permissions, memory and retrieval, guardrails and human review, plus evaluations, logs, and fallbacks. The agent acts; the rig makes the action usable.

The word also keeps us honest. It signals an assembled, inspectable setup rather than a finished product, and it reminds teams that the agent is not the deliverable. contract-rig reads better than contract-agentic-harness, and that clarity compounds across a codebase.