arXiv AI

The Scaffolding Matters More Than the Interface: A Controlled Comparison of MCP and CLI Tool Use Across Seven Agent Scaffoldings, Five Language Models, and One Software Task

arXiv:2608. 08654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How much an AI coding agent costs to run can depend more on the agent scaffolding that drives it than on the interface through which it reaches its tools.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

Don't Blame the Large Language Model: How Scaffolding Evolution Shapes Coding Agent Quality

arXiv:2607. 03691v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coding agents, autonomous systems that use large language models (LLMs) to resolve software engineering tasks, rely on agentic scaffolding: a middleware layer in between a developer and a large language model that orchestrates system prompts, tool execution, context management, and iterative reasoning loops.

By Oussama Ben Sghaier, Hao Li, Bram Adams, Ahmed E. Hassan
arXiv AI
Aug 6

ORCA-bench: How Ready Are Language Model Agents for Oncall?

arXiv:2607. 28545v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models can write, patch, and search code, but oncall root cause analysis (RCA) demands something different: reasoning over noisy metrics, logs, traces, and source code, starting from ambiguous user-facing reports, often hours after the incident began.

By Albert Gong, Kyuseong Choi, Abhineet Agarwal, Jason Schechner, Ryan Huang, Raj Agrawal, Anish Agarwal, Raaz Dwivedi
arXiv AI
2d ago

Mingbird: A Local-First Agent Harness Enabling Small Open Models to Complete Real Tasks

Mingbird is a local‑first agent harness designed for small open‑weight language models (2–9 B) that run on ordinary laptops. It introduces ten mechanisms—such as a byte‑level net‑zero prefill budget, a finish gate that re‑reads the task before accepting completion, and signature‑level loop detection—to address common failure modes that arise from the harness rather than the model itself. In controlled experiments on the LRAB benchmark and the $ au^2$‑bench, Mingbird achieves higher overall scores (0.886 and 0.856 respectively) compared to other harnesses, and its ablation studies show that each mechanism contributes measurable performance gains.

By Hao Wang, Ting Huang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 10

Claw-SWE-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating OpenClaw-style Agent Harnesses on Coding Tasks

General-purpose agents such as OpenClaw are increasingly used as autonomous tool users, but their coding ability is difficult to measure under SWE-bench: a generic agent does not by itself satisfy the clean Docker workspace, patch, and prediction contract required for scoring. We introduce Claw-SWE-Bench, a multilingual SWE-bench-style benchmark and adapter protocol that makes heterogeneous agent harnesses, or claws, comparable under fair settings including a fixed prompt, runtime budget, workspace contract, patch extraction procedure, and evaluator.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

AgentRoom: Concurrent Multi-Agent Coding in a CRDT-Backed Shared Workspace

AgentRoom introduces a real‑time collaborative editing protocol that enables concurrent coding by multiple large language model agents within a CRDT‑backed shared workspace. By providing file‑level claim, status, and broadcast tools, it allows agents to coordinate directly rather than relying on serial phase handoffs or independent sampling. Experiments with five frontier coding‑CLI models show that AgentRoom reduces task abandonment and run‑to‑run variation compared to solo or parallel‑merge approaches, highlighting the importance of coordination over mere parallelism.

By Seonglae Cho, Donghyun Lee
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

Claw-SWE-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating OpenClaw-style Agent Harnesses on Coding Tasks

arXiv:2606. 12344v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: General-purpose agents such as OpenClaw are increasingly used as autonomous tool users, but their coding ability is difficult to measure under SWE-bench: a generic agent does not by itself satisfy the clean Docker workspace, patch, and prediction contract required for scoring.

By Mengyu Zheng, Kai Han, Boxun Li, Haiyang Xu, Yuchuan Tian, Wei He, Hang Zhou, Jianyuan Guo, Hailin Hu, Lin Ma, Chao Xu, Guohao Dai, Lixue Xia, Yunchao Wei, Yunhe Wang, Yu Wang