I’m definitely on the deterministic code train as well. All of my success for long running tasks has been around wrapping the agentic harness (cc, codex-cli, etc.) in a deterministic workflow with deterministic gates. We need a name for this outer layer. In my mind that is the true harness because it constrains the agents failure mode. I think flow engineering has been proposed. Maybe it’s the agentic exoskeleton?
I believe they call it "loop engineering"
I call it tool-response engineering -- the tool-response JSON object itself and any content supplied, plus the available mechanisms after an initial tool call has been made.