arXiv:2607. 22585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Public leaderboards for coding agents typically rank systems by model name and pass rate, while the surrounding harness (the scaffold that issues tools, manages context, and decides when to stop) is often under-specified.
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.
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.
The paper investigates how altering the harness—specifically the way a coding agent manages context and tool outputs—affects performance when the underlying model and task remain unchanged. Two harness configurations were compared on three coding benchmarks: a control that preserves the full conversation in order, and a treatment that mechanically shortens older tool results to keep the context tight. Across all benchmarks, the treatment increased the mean per‑task fail‑to‑pass fraction and, in some cases, the number of complete solutions, demonstrating that the harness itself can significantly influence a frozen model’s effectiveness.
arXiv:2609.11987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: An agentic coding system couples a language model to a harness: the tools, prompts and control flow that turn a chat model into an autonomous softwar...
The study evaluates 66 combinations of four configurable harnesses and five language models across three benchmark suites, revealing that model rankings and best harnesses vary significantly with the task. Notably, the openJiuwen harness consistently yields the highest scores for the Kimi model, while GPT performs best with the lean PI scaffold on Terminal‑Bench 4. The findings demonstrate that a model’s performance is highly dependent on the harness it is paired with, and that higher cost or a vendor’s own harness does not guarantee superior results.
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.
UniACE is a unified framework that standardizes the evaluation of large language model (LLM) agents by representing each benchmark as an instruction–tool–environment triplet and running models through a shared, task‑agnostic harness in isolated runtimes. It preserves native success criteria, offers an offline mode for dynamic‑resource tasks, and standardizes efficiency metrics, execution records, and failure attribution. Applying UniACE to 7 benchmarks across 24 domains and 15 models revealed significant score shifts, ranking reversals, and sensitivity to evidence representation, highlighting the impact of evaluation configuration on reported agent performance.
arXiv:2607. 10569v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern coding agents expose multiple tool surfaces -- IDE primitives, bash, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) code-execution -- and the field has shipped three contradictory claims about which one matters.
Mid‑Harness proposes a test‑time compute strategy that samples and verifies candidate actions before execution, keeping the underlying generator and harness unchanged. Experiments show that with a strong verifier, sampling more actions significantly boosts success rates—e.g., a GPT‑5.6 verifier raises Pass@1 from 50.00 % to 68.03 % on TerminalBench‑Lite using eight samples. The approach also improves performance across various models, benchmarks, and harnesses, demonstrating that action scaling is a promising target for enhancing terminal agent reliability.
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:2609.06059v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models evolve from question-answering systems into general-purpose agents, evaluation must move beyond static answer correctness to a...
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.