Agents & Harnesses - What's Behind the AI That Writes Your Code
Asmae el Issaoui
About this talk
AI coding tools have evolved beyond autocomplete into fully autonomous agents that are capable of planning, implementing, testing, and delivering code with minimal human intervention. The session will focus on the orchestration layer that defines how an agent interacts with your codebase, tools, and security boundaries.
This session explains what agents and harnesses are, why the harness matters, and what this shift means for dev teams. After briefly mapping the landscape (Copilot, Codex, Claude Code, Kiro), we dive deep into Kiro v3 as a concrete example of harness-first design:
Spec-driven development — prompts become requirements, architecture designs, and sequenced tasks
Sub-agents — parallel execution with isolated contexts
Plan mode — step-by-step orchestration with checkpoints
Skills & Powers — reusable agent capabilities that follow you across IDE, CLI, and Web
Unified harness — one engine, every surface
Kiro Crew — agentic workspace with OS-level sandboxing and audit trails
Speaker
I'm Asmae el Issaoui, a Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services, where I've spent four years helping enterprise customers across the Nordics design and implement AI solutions - from early-stage ideation all the way to production workloads.
I'm part of AWS's EMEA-wide AI/ML Technical Field Community, focused on generative AI and application development. Over the past two years, my work has centered on agentic systems: helping organizations understand where autonomous AI can drive real business value, and then building the architecture to make it happen.
I was the Content Lead for AI topics at AWS Summit Stockholm and I've delivered a multi-modal AI workshop at re:Invent. I also run hands-on AI workshops and development days for customers across the Nordics.