The study investigates how individual components of a coding harness—planning, action space, and context management—affect autonomous coding agents’ performance. By fixing the execution loop and varying these components across 176 settings on SWE‑Bench Verified and Terminal‑Bench 2.1, the authors find that context management is most valuable when context windows are tight, staging rule‑based elision before LLM summarization yields the best efficiency, planning serves as an accuracy scaffold for weaker models and a cost saver for stronger ones, and predefined tools help models with limited bash skills while bash‑capable models benefit from a bash‑only interface. Trajectory‑level analysis shows that context management lengthens execution paths, planning alters where trajectories terminate, and the action space determines code granularity, offering a modular framework for future harness design.
arXiv:2606. 30573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce SWE-Interact, a new testbed for evaluating coding agents on multi-turn, interactive, user-driven software engineering tasks.
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...
arXiv:2607. 14159v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An agent harness is the external control layer that turns a base LLM into an executable agent by managing context, tools, orchestration, memory, decoding, and output handling.
arXiv:2609.08318v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The transition from human-centric assistance to Autonomous Software Engineering (ASE) agents has enabled the resolution of complex real-world SE task...
arXiv:2606. 28480v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models and harness frameworks continue to advance, agents operating in terminals are increasingly capable of performing a broader range of general computer-use tasks beyond coding.
Terminal-Universe is a framework that transforms large collections of terminal‑based agent trajectories into reusable, executable environments. By replaying recorded file operations and completing missing files, it reconstructs the original workspace and task, then synthesizes new tasks and multi‑round interactions. The resulting 37.3k task‑sufficient environments enable significant performance gains when fine‑tuning language models on terminal‑based benchmarks.
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.
ContextPilot is a proactive context‑management framework designed to improve long‑horizon agentic reasoning with large language models. It expands the toolset to include planning, long‑term memory, and soft context offloading, and introduces a reinforcement‑learning strategy that focuses on critical editing decisions and assigns action‑level advantages. Experiments on long‑context QA and deep search tasks demonstrate that ContextPilot achieves stronger performance with a more compact working context, outperforming existing baselines across various base models and benchmarks.
arXiv:2609.01481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper studies autonomous software development, in which LLM-based coding agents transform high-level requirements into complete, functional, and u...
Terminal-Universe is a framework that converts large collections of terminal-based agent trajectories into reusable, executable environments. By replaying recorded file operations and filling missing files with a completion agent, it reconstructs the original workspace and generates new tasks, scaling them in breadth (cross-workspace queries) and depth (multi-round interactions). The resulting 37.3k task-sufficient environments enable significant performance gains when fine‑tuning language models on terminal‑centric benchmarks.
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.
arXiv:2607. 13285v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The capability of a modern AI agent depends not only on its foundation model but also on its harness, which constructs prompts, manages state, invokes tools, and coordinates execution.