The paper reports experiments with six frontier AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google DeepMind, using ten independent sessions per model type and a three‑stage prompt sequence that shifts from architectural preference to a full ASCII backbone. Under a school‑audience framing, responses consistently converged on a shared architectural pattern featuring persistent latent state, adaptive computation, memory, specialist routing, verification, stopping control, and delayed decoding, while removing the framing led to more heterogeneous results. A notable observation is the close overlap between GPT‑5.6 Sol’s elaborate successor architecture and GPT‑6 Astra’s independently sketched design, raising questions about shared design priors or independent convergence.
An agent harness is what turns a language model into an autonomous agent: the surrounding code that builds the model's context, mediates its tools, runs the loop, and persists state across a long-hori...
The paper examines three open-source agent harnesses—LangChain’s deepagents, Earendil’s pi, and DeepSeek’s dsh—each built from contrasting design philosophies. By analyzing their source code and commit histories, the authors find that the mature harnesses converge on five common architectural elements: a commoditized loop, an append‑only replayable session record, model quirks stored as data, progressive disclosure of context, and explicit extension seams. A fourth harness, used as a held‑out check, also displays all five elements and even reuses another’s implementation, indicating that convergence arises from parallel discovery, diffusion, and literal reuse rather than independent invention. The study notes a missing dimension—external verifiability via a tamper‑evident record—highlighting a future axis for provenance‑sensitive domains.
We study what happens when a single general-purpose large language model acts as the sole researcher on a long-horizon neural architecture design problem. The agent receives a scientific question, an initial hypothesis and motivation, a compute budget, and research affordances (source and experiment management, experiment tracking, literature access, and persistent memory), then autonomously proposes, implements, evaluates, and records experiments over an extended period.
arXiv:2606. 04025v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dominant programming paradigms inherit an execution model optimised for a bygone era of a single human mind instructing a local machine, leaving contemporary systems burdened with historical path dependencies.
arXiv:2608. 01548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language can be viewed as a formalized subset of thought: a consequence-governed symbolic structure projected from wider situated cognition.
arXiv:2607. 06269v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current large language models (LLMs) are fundamentally stateless: their behavior is fully determined by input at inference time, and any higher-order cognitive architecture must be simulated at the application layer through prompt engineering and context management.
The paper introduces agentic meta‑reasoning, a structured inference‑time framework that explicitly manages control decisions—such as selecting partial work, restarting, or stopping—during long‑horizon agentic tasks. By delegating task execution to workers and consolidating decisions through a lightweight controller that references persistent memory, the method reduces the need to replay full histories. Experiments on ProgramBench and other benchmarks show that meta‑reasoning improves performance over direct control baselines, especially as computation budgets increase, and reveals greater reuse of earlier work and higher solution coverage.
arXiv:2606. 07720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities on mathematical and multi-hop planning tasks.
The paper introduces the concept of substrate blindness, where AI agents lack execution context in their planning. By providing a 128 MB RAM and 10 s wall‑time contract to large language models, the authors show that agents generate code that uses less memory, runs faster, and incorporates structural changes such as bounded blocking and in‑place buffers. Across three leading models, contract disclosure improved resource usage and correctness, demonstrating that minimal execution contracts can guide agents to produce more efficient programs.
arXiv:2608. 10504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As coding agents increasingly handle implementation, the central challenge shifts from building individual agents to building an infrastructure that systematically improves them.
arXiv:2606. 30111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied agents are typically built as hand-designed compositions of perception, memory, planning, and action modules.
arXiv:2606. 30111v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Embodied agents are typically built as hand-designed compositions of perception, memory, planning, and action modules.