Harness, Scaffold, and the AI Agent Terms Worth Getting Right

AI Agents Are Here. What Now?

HarnessX: A Composable, Adaptive, and Evolvable Agent Harness Foundry

arXiv:2606. 14249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agent performance depends critically on the runtime harness, comprising the prompts, tools, memory, and control flow that mediate how a model observes, reasons, and acts.

Import AI 461: "Alignment is not on track"; FrontierCode; and synthetic research interns

Where are your agents right now?

Towards Agentic AI Governance: A Preliminary Assessment

arXiv:2607. 07612v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving from generative systems to agentic AI capable of autonomously planning and executing tasks.

Towards the Harness of Embodied Agents

arXiv:2608. 11246v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The success of coding agents has established the harness as a paradigm: what an agent achieves depends not on the model alone, but on the infrastructure around it.

Defining AI Agents: A Compendium of Criteria, Metrics, and Benchmarks

The article "Defining AI Agents: A Compendium of Criteria, Metrics, and Benchmarks" surveys the lack of a standard definition for AI agents and organizes this ambiguity into five dimensions: environmental interaction, learning and adaptation, autonomy, goal‑directed behavior, and temporal coherence. It reviews how each dimension has been conceptualized in prior work and compiles the metrics, benchmarks, and evaluation frameworks used to assess them. The authors also introduce the Agent Compendium, a public digital resource that extends these evaluation methods, aiming to provide a common structure for evaluating and comparing agent capabilities across AI systems.