Removing Reflection from TeaQL Java's Core Path: Runtime Determinism as Harness Engineering
TeaQL Java did not remove every use of reflection from the repository. We did something more practical: we removed reflection from the core entity execution path, isolated the remaining reflective utilities, and added build-time guardrails to stop reflection from quietly returning.
GraalVM Native Image was an important forcing function, but it was not the highest-level reason for the work. The larger goal was to make the runtime environment more deterministic: important behavior should be explicit, inspectable, bounded, and enforceable before a production request reaches it.
We see that as harness engineering. The reliability of a system should not depend only on developers or coding agents remembering the right conventions. The surrounding environment—generated code, metadata, module boundaries, compiler-visible calls, build rules, and tests—should constrain execution into known-good paths.