The AI Harness: why your AI coding agent is only as smart as the repo you put it in

Hi. I am an engineer at Activepieces , an open source automation platform (think Zapier, but you can self host it and read the source code). I write TypeScript for a living. I argue with bots about tabs vs spaces now. And our team spent the last few months really, really invested in one question: Why does our AI coding agent suck in this codebase, but cook so hard in a blank Next.js project on my laptop? Spoiler: it is not the model. It is never the model. It is me. It is the repo. It is the thi