arXiv AI

Harness Engineering for Software Engineering via Modular Executable Dev-Primitives

arXiv AI
Oct 1

E2E-SWE: Benchmarking LLMs on Building Working Codebases from Scratch

E2E-SWE is a benchmark that tests large language models’ ability to create complete, functional software repositories from scratch. It includes 186 tasks across 11 programming languages, each requiring an agent to build an installable project based solely on a natural‑language specification and an empty workspace, while passing a hidden test suite. The benchmark was crafted by software engineers and LLMs, then refined through iterative verification by autonomous agents to ensure clarity and solvability.

By Hantian Ding, Chloe Bi, Jiacheng Zhu, John Yang, Matt Deitke, Pengcheng Yin, Zijian Wang, Rui Hou
arXiv AI
Sep 18

BuildBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Compiling Real-World Open-Source Software

BuildBench introduces a realistic benchmark for evaluating large language model agents on the task of compiling open‑source software (OSS). It includes diverse OSS projects that lack clear build instructions, have undocumented dependencies, and may require source patching or script modification. The authors also present OSS‑BUILD‑AGENT, a baseline LLM‑based agent that retrieves build instructions effectively and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on the benchmark.

By Zehua Zhang, Ati Priya Bajaj, Divij Handa, Siyu Liu, Arvind S Raj, Hongkai Chen, Hulin Wang, Yibo Liu, Zion Leonahenahe Basque, Souradip Nath, Vishal Juneja, Nikhil Chapre, Tiffany Bao, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Adam Doup\'e, Chitta Baral, Ruoyu Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 10

TTHE: Test-Time Harness Evolution

arXiv:2607. 08124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The behavior of an LLM agent is determined not only by the underlying model, but also by its harness: the executable program that constructs context, invokes tools, verifies intermediate results, and recovers from failures.

By Jun Nie, Yonggang Zhang, Jun Song, Qianshu Cai, Dahai Yu, Yike Guo, Xinmei Tian, Bo Han
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

ModularRSI: Modular and Generalizable Recursive Harness Self-Improvement

arXiv:2609.14857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work extends recursive self-improvement (RSI) to agent harnesses for long-horizon coding and terminal tasks, enabling agents to improve executio...

By Siwei Wu, Jincheng Ren, Yizhi Li, Haau-Sing Li, Chengran Yang, Yuxuan Zhang, Weicheng Gu, Jian Yang, Riza Batista-Navarro, Chuanyi Zhang, Xianglong Liu, Ming Zhou, Bryan Dai, Chenghua Lin
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Composing Task-specific Agent Harnesses at Test Time with Reusable Primitives

The paper introduces Harness Primitives—reusable agent harness mechanisms mined from failed task trajectories—and a framework called STITCH that selects and composes these primitives into task‑specific harnesses at test time. This approach avoids generating or debugging harness code for each task, achieving up to 12‑point gains in task success over fixed harness baselines and outperforming human‑designed harnesses like Codex CLI. STITCH also demonstrates minimal test‑time overhead (2.7%) and scales efficiently with the size of the primitive library.

By Peng Kuang, Haibo Jin, Dehao Wu, Feiyang Deng, Xiaopeng Yuan, Jerry Wang, Haohan Wang
arXiv AI
Jul 17

StructureClaw: Traceable LLM Agents and an Executable Benchmark for Structural Engineering Workflows

arXiv:2607. 14896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Addressing a structural-engineering request requires more than a single answer; it requires a chain of interdependent artifacts: interpreted requirements, a computable model, validation records, solver outputs, code-check records, and a final report.

By Sizhong Qin, Yi Gu, Yao Jiang, Ao Cai, Changjian Zhou, Shaoxuan Shuai, Jiachang Wang, Tianhao Shen, Yueqiang Li, Xinhao Li, Li Zeng, Yueshi Chen, Dachen Gao, Genrong Xu, Wenjie Liao, Xinzheng Lu
arXiv AI
3d ago

Self-Supervised Scaling of Terminal Environments for Scientific Domains

The paper introduces a self‑supervised framework called software‑in‑the‑loop reconstruction (SWR) that automatically generates reference outputs and verification targets for terminal agents by leveraging existing scientific software workflows. SWR executes multiple input configurations, partitions cases into public observations and hidden evaluations, and uses a hierarchical verifier to assess agent‑generated programs against hidden workflow outputs. The authors demonstrate the approach on 500 workflows across six domains, achieving significant performance gains on the Terminal‑Bench 2 benchmark with the Qwen3.8‑Max and Qwen3.8‑27B models.

By Zhongzhi Li, Yucheng Shi, Zongxia Li, Junyao Yang, Ruhan Wang, Yu Wang, Jingyuan Huang, Jichao Yu, Ninghao Liu, Haitao Mi, Leowei Liang
arXiv AI
Jul 22

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

arXiv:2607. 03691v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Coding agents, autonomous systems that use large language models (LLMs) to resolve software engineering tasks, rely on agent harness: 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 11

$A^2E$ : An End-to-End Agent Auditing Engine

arXiv:2608. 07346v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), harnesses have become essential infrastructure for deploying agents across a wide range of domains.

By Haoning Wang, Mingxun Zhang, Chenyue Yu, Yingjun Shang, Xia Hu, Guanchu Wang, Na Zou