🤖 Can an AI agent build and improve the very execution scaffolding it runs on?
Title: HarnessDev: Can LLMs Create and Evolve Their Own Agent Harness?
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❓ What exactly is a "harness"?
💡 It's the execution substrate around a model -- loops, tool use, context management, failure recovery, verification. Evaluations usually hold the harness fixed and only measure the model, but harness quality itself turns out to shape real capability a lot.
❓ Can LLMs build one from almost nothing?
💡 Starting from a deliberately weak seed, even the top creator (Opus 4.8) scored just 67.8 versus 86.2 for the human reference. The gap was widest in research/search tasks.
❓ Can models improve their own harness over time?
💡 All five self-runtime creators improved on visible feedback, but gains shrank sharply on held-out tasks. Of 64 version switches, only 2 showed improvement beyond noise.
❓ Does a harness transfer to a different executor model?
💡 Often not. Opus's harness dropped from 69.3 to 33.0 on SWE-Pro the moment the executor was fixed to Gemini -- harnesses bake in assumptions about the specific model running them.
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