Great paper on self-improving agent harnesses. (bookmark it) If you maintain a production agent harness, finding every file behind one behavior is often harder than writing the edit. Harness Handbook builds a three-level map from runtime behaviors to source locations using static analysis and LLM-assisted structuring. Its BGPD workflow guides coding agents from the system overview to relevant stages, functions, and files, then verifies every candidate against current source. Across 60 modification requests on Codex and Terminus-2, handbook guidance raised planning win rates from 28.3% to 38.3% and from 26.7% to 45.6%. Planner token use fell 12.7% and 8.6%. File- and symbol-level F1 improved in all 24 comparisons against GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.8 reference plans. Complete localization misses fell by as much as 25.9 points. This is a strong pattern for coding agents that need to evolve large harnesses without losing scattered or rarely executed behavior. Paper: Learn to build effective AI agents in our academy:

anyone thinking about, learning, or already working with agentic systems, you should know this. the first few steps of your setup matter more than any model or framework you pick later. get them right and you never lose your flow. the foundation nobody posts about: > 1. tailscale. a private mesh network across every machine you own. laptop, desktop, rented node, all on one secure tailnet, reachable from anywhere. nothing else works well until this does. > 2. termius, over that tailnet. one SSH client that reaches every node, phone included. you are never away from your stack. > 3. tmux. persistent sessions. disconnect, close the laptop, come back, every session exactly where you left it. agentic work runs long, your terminal has to survive that. > 4. a private git repo. the one i am most glad i found. it is the memory layer across all my agents, they pull, they work, they merge back, the codebase stays alive between sessions. context that would die in a chat window lives in the repo instead. > 5. script everything from day one. ssh aliases for every node, setup scripts, the boring boilerplate automated. if you will do a thing more than twice, it is a script. everything past these five is decorative. know these cold. and the habit that ties it together: ask the AI itself. for the config, for the error, for any of it, let the agent do the lifting, then double check what it hands you. lock the five, build the habit, and you make it. skip it, anon, and you ngmi.