Your Agent Didn’t Fail. Your Harness Did.
Vinoth Govindarajan
- When
- Tuesday, June 3011:10 AM – 11:30 AM · 20 min
- Where
- Track 1San Francisco, CA · imported from ai.engineer's public schedule feed
About this session
AI agents do not fail only because the model is wrong. Many production failures happen in the harness around the model: state is not persisted, two runs mutate the same session, a tool call never returns, an approval loses scope, or an internal success never becomes user-visible proof. This talk uses OpenClaw as a public case study to examine real harness failure modes and extract a reusable production model for AI engineers. We will look at how events enter an agent system, how session state is rehydrated, why single-writer lanes and throttles matter, and why tool execution needs scoped approvals and auditable receipts. The core idea is simple: a model proposes, the harness commits, and the receipt proves it. Attendees will leave with a practical 'run receipt' audit they can apply to their own agents: what woke it up, which state did it inherit, what authority did it use, what executed, and what evidence survived.
Speaker
Member of Technical Staff, OpenAI
Vinoth Govindarajan is a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI, where he works on core data infrastructure for large-scale AI systems and internal agent platforms. His work focuses on control planes, stateful architectures, scalability, low-latency systems, observability, and reliability patterns that make production system safe, resilient, and predictable. Vinoth brings an end-to-end perspective on modern data platforms and open table formats. Before OpenAI, he was a Staff Software Engineer at Apple, where he helped build next-generation data platforms using Apache Iceberg, Spark, Trino, and Flink. Earlier, at Uber, he developed incremental ETL frameworks and real-time data pipelines powered by Apache Hudi. Outside of his work, he is the co-author of Engineering Lakehouses with Open Table Formats book and writes The Agent Stack on substack platform, a systems-first publication about production AI agents and data infrastructure. Vinoth is also an open-source contributor and has presented at industry conferences and community events on lakehouse architecture, data systems, and agent harness.
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For developers: this programme is open data — JSON, iCal, schedule XML and an MCP endpoint.Show endpointsHide
- JSONEvery published session and speaker, in one request./aie-worldsfair-2026-import/feed.json
- iCalSubscribe in Google, Apple or Outlook Calendar./aie-worldsfair-2026-import/feed.ics
- Schedule XMLfrab / pentabarf — the format conference apps import./aie-worldsfair-2026-import/feed.xml
- MCP + RESTPoint Claude at the programme. OpenAPI 3.1 included./agents
No key, no signup, CORS open. Everything here is generated from the same data the organisers edit.