The job changed, and most of us didn't even notice, we're harness engineers now. Our work is the system that helps produce and verify the code. The constraints, the gates, the skills, the verification.
Andrew OrobatorSenior Software Engineer · Practitioner, 
Reddit
Context. The speaker is a Reddit Android engineer speaking about engineers in general, not describing a Reddit policy.
Talk: Scale the Judgment, Not the Model, AI Engineer (YouTube), June 30, 2026, at 02:06.
Andrew Orobator, Senior Software Engineer. Describes an agent he built and runs himself and the practices he uses with coding agents; a practitioner speaking for himself, not for Reddit, and he says some practices are from his personal side projects.
Checked against the source by a first reader, then confirmed independently by a second reader who fetched the source without seeing the first reader's notes (Independent review agent (Claude Sonnet), blind second pass from passage text and citation only, no repository access, 2026-11-01).
Whisper SRT 00:02:06-00:02:17 matches word for word. Only punctuation differs.
Andrew Orobator (Reddit), “Scale the Judgment, Not the Model”, AI Engineer (YouTube), 2026-06-30, at 02:06. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MudaeKdBSk Archived at https://the-ai-record.com/passages/reddit-job-changed-harness-engineers-now-system-produce-verify-code-2026
I got tired of watching old feature flags pile up… I built an agent for cleaning up stale feature flags. It runs in my local workflow and it doesn't merge any code. The models, the easy part. The judgment in front of it is the whole game. Every flag gets scored the way an experienced reviewer would analyze it. How many modules does it touch? Is it multi-variant? Does it share a component? Then it checks the experiment data. Is the rollout frozen? Is there a sample ratio mismatch? Is there a variant already rolled out to 100 percent?
Andrew OrobatorSenior Software Engineer · Practitioner, Reddit
Context. The speaker is a Reddit Android engineer. In the talk he describes this agent as running in his local workflow and on his laptop, and says some of his other practices are from his personal side projects.
Talk: Scale the Judgment, Not the Model, AI Engineer (YouTube), June 30, 2026, at 11:18.
Before I trusted this workflow, I back tested the scoring against months of clean up history. Then I ran it live. Seven for seven PRs with green CI. Now it runs daily on my laptop and hands work back for me to review. … $1.26 a pull request. A backlog of around 520 flags a year runs for under $700. If you had engineers working on this by hand, at least $26,000 that you're looking at.
Andrew OrobatorSenior Software Engineer · Practitioner, Reddit
Context. The speaker is a Reddit Android engineer. In the talk he describes this agent as running in his local workflow and on his laptop, and says some of his other practices are from his personal side projects. The $26,000 is his own estimate of manual cost, and the PR count is a small sample.
Talk: Scale the Judgment, Not the Model, AI Engineer (YouTube), June 30, 2026, at 11:59.
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