Arseny Kravchenko, Founding AI Engineer @ Archestra, AI Advisor @ Amasty
Over 10 years in applied AI/ML, from on-device AR try-on at WANNABY (acquired by Farfetch) to AI agents at Neon (acquired by Databricks). Author of the Machine Learning System Design book.
Meet Magento Poland 2026
Harness Engineering 101: Designing Specialized Agents From First Principles
We want to build an AI agent” is usually the wrong way to start an engineering initiative.
Autonomous agency is not free: it introduces heavy architectural taxes caused by higher risks and uncertainty. Generic autonomous agents fail in unfamiliar domain environments. When dealing with deep technical stacks—like hundreds of Magento extensions, version conflicts, expiring patches, and messy ticket histories—you cannot simply hand a prompt to an LLM and hope for the best. Reliable agents aren’t magic models; they are carefully engineered control systems.
In this talk, we dissect the architecture of a production-grade specialized agent built for automated developer & merchant support in the Magento ecosystem. We will explore the journey from a naive RAG pipeline to a true domain-grounded agent from first principles of harness engineering.