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About this paper
Joongho Ahn, Moonsoo Kim
This research introduces a "harness-engineering" approach to transform prompt-dominant LLM prototypes into auditable enterprise agents. It demonstrates that explicit, code-owned contracts and validation gates, rather than prompt instructions, reliably enforce source traceability, entity routing, and output hygiene, maintaining system utility even when LLM output is inconsistent.
Key insights
- Enterprise-grade reliability for LLM agents is achieved through verifiable engineering artifacts and explicit, code-owned contracts, rather than relying on emergent LLM behavior from prompts.
- Core system guarantees (e.g., source grounding, entity routing, trace completeness, output hygiene) can be made robust and model-agnostic by encapsulating them in a deterministic control layer with fallback mechanisms.
- Prompt instructions alone are insufficient for robust contract enforcement in enterprise LLM applications; dedicated code-owned validation gates are necessary to prevent violations without sacrificing utility.
Summary by alphaXiv.
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