AI Integrations (Observability & Evals & Red Teaming) AISidesKicks

Hi There 🤝

I spent 10+ years as QA/QE & Integration Engineer - hands-on experience delivering quality on complex, high-stakes SW projects across TELCO and RETAIL industries.

I spent 10+ years as Architect & Implementation Engineer - hands-on experience delivering complex HPC, ML and AI clusters and HW/SW solutions based on NVIDIA for FORTUNE 100 companies.

It was a very funny task to fit it all on my LinkedIn.

For many companies most interesting learned lesson from AI PoC and MVP is: you suddenly have patched together 100+ AI building elements and token consumption jumped through the roof, it doesn't scale and it doesn't have defined realistic tokenomics - so next time bring experienced Integration and Inference engineers on board too. PLEASE! We know how to scale and measure - we have System Thinking and End2End approaches in our toolkit too.

I know how to do my job. AI doesn't! PERIOD!!!

Well:

As AI gets better and better at code, the AI harnesses keep improving themselves and code can be checked by itself. This builds a self-improving RSI loop that extends beyond code, into Infra and Integrations too.

But for now they do it in a naive, messy, not caring way, because they live in labs with siloed environments, not real enterprise ones - this can potentially encourage reward hacking.

AI can handle narrowly focused tasks fine, but it trips over the complexity of integrations and long-term stability needed for infra - unlike code and the predefined environments in labs, the enterprise is messy and variable all the time.

AI is, for now, very LAZY when it comes to REAL Integrations or Infra management, and it can be very dangerous without the right human proactive guidance.

YES! An Agentic Infrastructure will one day fully replace the current mostly template-based Infrastructure as Code (IaC). But for now, we need to set up and guide the AI Harness to actually be helpful and do it right.

Let's share together how to do it!

We all will be EDUCATORs very soon

Thanks to fortune, I am ALSO a certified, after-class educator - I teach a lot of teens the basics of STEAM using Experiential Education, EEE.

Now I'm using that hard-won experience to nurture a group of AI HARNESSes - teaching them not just to execute tasks, but to think critically, see systems holistically, and deliver real engineering value outside of just coding.

The main point of Experiential Education is Learning by Doing - this is the core of the Self-Improving approach in AI Harnesses too, but they are doing it for now in a very naive way. They are not "natural learners" - we will need to help them simulate aspects like this:

Curiosity-driven rewards: reward the harness for exploring and asking questions, not just for finishing the task
Metacognitive loops: let it reflect on how it approached a problem and reuse what worked next time
Dynamic taxonomy: keep its mental model of the world updated as it learns new things

Specialized customized Agentic AI Harnesses

With revelation of minimal coding agent Pi and others, we have the possibility to assemble our own LEGO-like stack to ideally fix AI applications in our real JOBs.

Here are my setups (inspired by lazyPI) and I create specialized architect https://gritty.guidera.party

my.pietra.dev - Custom AI harness for Integration Engineers based on PI
my.taufiq.dev - Custom AI harness for Inference Engineers based on TAU
3d.demessea.dev - Custom AI harness for de-messing vibecoded stuff based on DeepSeek Harness

My work on AI Harnesses was originally inspired by NVIDIA AVO blog and initial Stanford research.

Today we see a lot of NEW works about AI Harnesses, so I instruct Hermine, my hermess agent to proactively research this topic for me:

AVO: Agentic Variation Operators for Autonomous Evolutionary Search (arxiv:2603.24517 - 25 Mar 2026)

Co-Evolving Harnesses and Model Weights for LLM Agents (arxiv:2607.22688 - 17 Jul 2026)

AI is not just a SideKick any more!

Interview with DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering & Linux (Lex Fridman Podcast #501 - 25 Aug 2026)

Future is here - even our OS like Linux under our AI Harness will be Agentic and can be not only configured but also extended with AI?

Why AHA.AISidesKicks.fyi

The Side Kick inspiration?

The Side Kick is a fundamental technique in kickboxing that combines strength, balance, and coordination. It's not the flashy knockout punch. It's the reliable, technical move that keeps you in the fight.

In team sports, the best players aren't the solo heroes but the ones who make everyone around them better - the true sidekicks who turn individual effort into collective momentum.

In cooking, a sidekick refers to dishes that complement the main course. Not the star, but the thing that makes the star look good. Garlic bread knows its place.

So what are AI Sidekicks? Your technical partners that won't steal the spotlight but will absolutely save your bacon when the main event goes sideways.

Why the double plural? SidesKicks?

Because AI always wants to give you more than you asked for. One sidekick? Cute. Multiple sides, multiple kicks? Now we're talking.

And aha. ?

AHA - Because we are Advancing HUMANS with AI

And .fyi ?

For Your Info - Because information is the core of all learning experiences.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

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