Treating autonomous agents as untrusted participants: what the Claude Code harness suggests for on-chain mechanism design (opens in new tab)

This continues a line I have been posting here since early May about the gap between what a protocol can enforce on-chain and what actually happens off-chain, and how good mechanism design narrows that gap by making the dishonest action unprofitable rather than by trusting anyone to be honest. A recent event outside our usual subject matter gave me a clean, large external example of the same principle, and I think it is worth bringing back on topic because autonomous agents are about to becom...