Harness, Scaffold, and the AI Agent Terms Worth Getting Right

AI Agents Are Here. What Now?

HarnessX: A Composable, Adaptive, and Evolvable Agent Harness Foundry

arXiv:2606. 14249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agent performance depends critically on the runtime harness, comprising the prompts, tools, memory, and control flow that mediate how a model observes, reasons, and acts.

Import AI 461: "Alignment is not on track"; FrontierCode; and synthetic research interns

Where are your agents right now?

Towards Agentic AI Governance: A Preliminary Assessment

arXiv:2607. 07612v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving from generative systems to agentic AI capable of autonomously planning and executing tasks.

Towards the Harness of Embodied Agents

arXiv:2608. 11246v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The success of coding agents has established the harness as a paradigm: what an agent achieves depends not on the model alone, but on the infrastructure around it.

Defining AI Agents: A Compendium of Criteria, Metrics, and Benchmarks

The article "Defining AI Agents: A Compendium of Criteria, Metrics, and Benchmarks" surveys the lack of a standard definition for AI agents and organizes this ambiguity into five dimensions: environmental interaction, learning and adaptation, autonomy, goal‑directed behavior, and temporal coherence. It reviews how each dimension has been conceptualized in prior work and compiles the metrics, benchmarks, and evaluation frameworks used to assess them. The authors also introduce the Agent Compendium, a public digital resource that extends these evaluation methods, aiming to provide a common structure for evaluating and comparing agent capabilities across AI systems.

The Digital Apprentice: A Framework for Human-Directed Agentic AI Development

arXiv:2606. 04321v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic AI deployments face a recurring design tension: heavy human oversight limits scale, while broad autonomy outruns accountability.

What makes a harness a harness: necessary and sufficient conditions for an agent harness

arXiv:2606. 10106v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The term agent harness now circulates widely in software engineering with generative artificial intelligence.

Act As a Real Researcher: A Suite of Benchmarks Evaluating Frontier LLMs and Agentic Harnesses in Research Lifecycle

arXiv:2606. 07462v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As foundation models advance and agent scaffolding becomes increasingly sophisticated, agents have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in complex, long-horizon coding tasks and even autonomous experiment execution.

LOGOS: A Living Logic for AI Agent Teams That Evolve With Humans

arXiv:2607. 10878v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents are evolving from answer engines into persistent teams that use tools, delegate work, learn from experience, and modify the artifacts that shape their future behavior.

Co-Harness: Co-Evolving Harnesses and Model Weights for LLM Agents

arXiv:2607. 22688v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training agents for automated AI research requires optimizing not only model parameters, but also the runtime harness that shapes how research trajectories are generated, evaluated, and learned from.

How to manage AI investments in the agentic era

Learn how enterprises can manage AI investments in the agentic era by measuring useful work per dollar, improving efficiency, and scaling high-value workflows.