How Do Agent Harnesses Create Value? Planning Information and Release Control in Stateful LLM Agents

The paper investigates how agent harnesses—specifically planning guidance, execution organization, and completion verification—affect performance in retail and airline pilot tasks. By comparing fixed, task‑specific plans to shuffled policy text of equal length, the study finds that fixed plans improve success rates by about 7 percentage points, especially on complex tasks. A read‑only verifier rejects a majority of invalid episodes while incurring minimal cost, and its impact varies with the penalty for erroneous acceptance, often matching the full planning‑plus‑verification benefit at a lower cost.

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• llms
• agents