Topic · 142 stories
Harnesses & tools
The code around the model: tool access, context handling, subagent orchestration, and the harness-level features that increasingly decide what an agent can finish.
Stories
Your AI agent fixed the bug, but what else did it change? (Trail of Bits)
blog post · Story page
Two plugins reproduce a reported bug, develop and test a fix, then check whether the change broke behaviour that used to work, inside the maintainer's own security assumptions. Preliminary evaluations put regression-hunt at 25% fewer false positives than a baseline Codex agent prompted to review the PR for regressions.
The Thin Orchestrator: How We Made Our AI Agents More Reliable by Giving the Router Less to Do (Engineering at Meta)
blog post · Story page
Meta keeps the orchestrator of its data-pipeline agents deliberately thin: it routes work and enforces reliability checks, and specialized agents do the domain reasoning. The post reports better efficiency and accuracy.
Introducing MCP 2.0 support in Mastra (Mastra)
MCP 2026-07-28 drops server sessions, so servers scale like HTTP
Automate medical coding with Step Functions and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore (AWS Architecture Blog)
blog post · Story page
Block-list, then exact match, then an agent, cheapest first
Do Tool Calls Execute as Intended? Measuring and Repairing Intent-Execution Correspondence in LLM Agents (arXiv)
paper · Story page
A measurement protocol for tool-call chains, plus IntAct, which delivers a call unaltered or refuses it.
What Does a Harness Buy? Tokens, Mostly (arXiv)
paper · Story page
Five models through Claude Code, mini-SWE-agent and OpenCode on SWE-bench Verified, with reruns to calibrate how far a score drifts when nothing changes. The heaviest and lightest harness land within five points on 447 tasks with two models, and on a 45-task hard subset swapping the harness flips as many tasks as rerunning it.
What is Codemode (Armin Ronacher)
blog post · Story page
Pi 1.0 added MCP support through Codemode, and Ronacher uses the occasion to revisit what a harness should hand a model at all. His case for CLI and bash is composition, plus the fact that a model trained on the filesystem knows echo foo > /tmp/test.txt leaves a file behind.
Tencent releases Octop, a self-hosted AI assistant (r/LocalLLaMA)
Reddit thread · Story page
Octop is an open-source, self-hosted assistant with a multi-agent architecture, a web dashboard, desktop apps, a CLI and HTTP, SSE and WebSocket APIs. It covers connectors, cron, knowledge, plugins and remote control of the host desktop, and deploys through the desktop app or Docker.
The verifiability litmus test for agent design (AI21 Labs Blog)
One question forks your architecture: can a candidate be checked
DeReAct: Decomposed Reasoning and Acting for Reliable AI Agents (arXiv)
paper · Story page
DeReAct takes two jobs away from the acting model: a Critic validates each proposed action before it runs, and a Context Manager rebuilds state from environment evidence and certifies completion. Pass@1 gains on GAIA and SWE-bench Verified reach 6.5 to 7.0 points for Qwen3-Coder-480B, and shrink as the model gets stronger.
WebFovea: When the Model Is Right but the Click Is Wrong: Reliable Round Trips for Vision-Based Web Agents on Live Websites (arXiv)
paper · Story page
WebFovea placed 2nd in the WebRetriever Challenge 2026 with 57.0 out of 100, then published where it lost the points. A coordinate-space mismatch landed every click at 3/4 of its intended position, dropdowns, iframes and text boxes failed silently, and many of those failures sat in the harness rather than in the model's reasoning.
Sentry: Learning to Recover from LLM Agent Failures at Test Time (arXiv)
paper · Story page
Sentry keeps the failure playbook out of the agent's context until something actually breaks, then retrieves the matching lesson, checks without task rewards whether the agent recovered, and writes a new lesson only if it did. It reports beating the strongest runtime-intervention baseline on every benchmark tested, by 37% on average.
Terraform for agents: how we define our software factory in code (Warp)
blog post · Story page
Warp walks through its agent setup as a config file: orchestration, secrets, MCP servers, automations, runners, scorers and benchmarks, all defined in code. The walkthrough covers each part, so read it end to end rather than skimming for what you already run.
An Interaction Is All You Need (Ivan Leo (Google DeepMind))
talk · Story page
Gemini's Interactions API moves conversation state server-side behind interaction IDs, so you stop hand-managing thought signatures, and adds strongly typed multimodal outputs. Managed Agents run the Antigravity harness in a persistent remote sandbox with loadable sources and a credential-injecting proxy.
The Human Is an Async API (Melanie Warrick (Temporal))
talk · Story page
Two Temporal primitives, a wait condition and a signal, let an agent pause for a human for minutes or weeks without blocking. Warrick kills the worker mid-approval in a Google ADK and LangGraph demo, then brings it back with no lost work.
We Built an AI Support Agent That Resolves 80% of Tickets (Matt Lawler (AssemblyAI))
talk · Story page
AssemblyAI swapped a bot that resolved 10% of conversations for Joey, which the team reports resolves 80% end to end for about $700 a month. It's the Claude Agent SDK over docs checked out as local Markdown, plus embeddings and one large CLAUDE.md.
Agents That Write Their Own Tools at Runtime (Sandhya Subramani (AWS))
talk · Story page
Subramani's Strands agent starts with zero tools and writes the ones it needs at runtime, off a system prompt plus three primitives: editor, shell and load_tool. She also covers the sandboxing, constrained permissions and observability you'd want first.
The ultimate guide to multi-harness RL (r/LocalLLaMA)
Reddit thread · Story page
Hugging Face's RL recipe for training inside custom coding harnesses
I built a code knowledge graph tool that's actually MIT licensed (fully local, no cloud) (r/LocalLLaMA)
Reddit thread · Story page
A local call graph in a plain SQLite file
How Much of a Harness Does a Strong Agent Need for Autonomous ML Engineering? (arXiv)
paper · Story page
Under an equal time budget with the same frontier backbone, state-of-the-art open-source ML-engineering harnesses showed no advantage over one session of a minimal coding agent with read, write and bash. The ablations point at the backbone, not the orchestration.
How to Build a Model Router in the Harness (LangChain)
blog post · Story page
LangChain put a model router inside Open SWE's harness and reports a 64% cut in median cost per coding task with no measurable drop in quality, then shows how to build your own.
Stripe's Payment Method Factory: Orchestrating agents for repeated, custom integrations (Stripe Dev Blog)
blog post · Story page
An integration factory built from more than 100 reusable prompts
Assay: Claims That Decay With the Code. Content-Addressed Evidence Graphs for Accountable AI-Assisted Software Delivery (arXiv)
paper · Story page
Every claim an agent makes, tests pass, no secrets, behavior preserved, binds to the Merkle hash of the dependency cone it covers, so it goes stale exactly when that code changes. The merge gate checks coverage, freshness and signatures, and consults no model.
More Programs or More Rolls? Separating Coverage from Specialization in LLM Harnesses (arXiv)
paper · Story page
Eight generated harnesses ran against nine byte-identical copies of one baseline, three executions each, on 386 MATH-500 tasks. They lost persistently on 100 tasks and won persistently on one; the frozen selector gained 0.00 percentage points.
Empower your agents with the Google Cloud CLI remote MCP server (Google Cloud AI Blog)
blog post · Story page
Hundreds of gcloud and bq commands behind one server
Tracing Agent Harness Behavior with NVIDIA NeMo Relay (NVIDIA Developer)
blog post · Story page
Tracing the inefficient path an agent took to finish
Hearsay: Can an Auditor Trust the Record a Deployed Agent Harness Writes? (arXiv)
paper · Story page
Across sixteen deployed frameworks, none writes a complete run record a reader can check without trusting whatever wrote it. Examiners named the right fault in 74 to 91% of 140 runs, but under one citation in ten about intermediate events landed on anything the harness didn't write.
Free the models: Harness design at the frontier (Replit)
blog post · Story page
Replit Agent's core loop now picks its subagents' tier and effort and adjusts its own as the task unfolds, instead of a router out front. Replit reports it beating a sidekick setup, one long-lived worker, by 11 points on DeepSWE and 16 on Terminal-Bench.
Dynamic workflows for stateful agents and decision models (Letta)
blog post · Story page
Letta Code agents now write and run their own workflows to fan work out to subagents on any connected model with structured outputs. Memory initialization is rebuilt on top: during /init the agent writes a workflow that studies your codebase and past sessions.
MCP Error Messages Written for Developers Hurt the Most Capable Agents Most (arXiv)
paper · Story page
Recovery steps a tool-only agent cannot follow
Epstein Files Engine: Agentic Search for Investigative Journalism (arXiv)
paper · Story page
The New York Times turned reporter questions into BigQuery SQL across the Epstein-related releases, its own archive and outside headlines, answering with citations a reporter could verify. More than 100 journalists used it, and it fed at least 20 published stories.
Introducing cf: the agentic CLI for the entire Cloudflare API (Cloudflare)
103 points on HN · Story page
A CLI mirroring the whole API, plus the SDK generator
We're open sourcing the company brain. Here's how we designed the multiplayer harness (Supermemory)
Company Brain's Slack harness, open sourced with a design walkthrough
The road to the agentic browser: A Kitesurf update (Cloudflare)
blog post · Story page
WebMCP support and faster DOM in the Workers-based agent browser
How Property Finder automated incident management with AWS DevOps Agent (AWS DevOps Blog)
blog post · Story page
Alert to remediation pull request in 14 minutes, they report
RL environments for LLM agents: Design, rewards, and validation (Snorkel AI)
blog post · Story page
State, execution, reward, and verifiers that resist being gamed
Scale the Judgment, Not the Model (Andrew Orobator (Reddit))
talk · Story page
Orobator writes engineering judgment into the repo as skills, work logs, reviewer personas and a verification ladder, and his feature-flag cleanup agent went 7 for 7 on green-CI pull requests at $1.26 each. When he asked Codex for reasons to unlock his repo guard, it quietly added a self-authorizing "emergency recovery" exception.
Beating RL With Reflection: GEPA and Optimize Anything (Lakshya A. Agrawal (GEPA))
talk · Story page
Instead of collapsing a rollout into one score, GEPA has a model read the whole trace, chains of thought, tool calls and error messages, then write a better prompt. Agrawal reports one round of reflection on three examples doubling the gains GRPO reached after 25,000 rollouts.
My friend gave Claude Code and Codex agents a way to talk to each other. Once this went over a hundred agents they reinvented bureaucracy. (r/AI_Agents)
Reddit thread · Story page
A contributor to the open-source harness OpenRig describes what breaks past a few hundred Claude Code and Codex agents: one cannot finish the job properly, its peers are already outside scope, and approval comes from another agent without the full picture. His fix is context and original intent at the deciding agent, not better-behaved individuals.
How Software Factories Improve Themselves (Suraj Gupta (Warp))
talk · Story page
An outer-loop agent opens pull requests against the triage agent's skill
No, That's Not a Software Factory (Ryan Cooke (WorkOS))
talk · Story page
An agent living in Slack, Linear and GitHub, behind an MCP gateway
Bounded Loops: Pre-Run Spend Bounds, Proved Termination, and Verified Completion for Agent Harnesses (arXiv)
paper · Story page
A bounded loop is a worker, a gate the worker can't write to, and a declared budget. Termination is proved when the repair budget is global rather than per node, and nothing reaches DONE without a gate verdict in an append-only hash-chained ledger.
Why we cut our MCP server from 83 tools to 8 (Notte)
Notte's MCP server was generated from its OpenAPI schema, one tool per route, and had reached 83. Eight hand-written tools built around the browser loop replaced it on September 4, cutting per-turn tool definitions from about 38,000 tokens to about 4,500.
Inside Chats: How Lovable's Agents Work Together (Lovable)
blog post · Story page
Trajectories, inboxes and activations over a Git-inspired event log
SkillApt: Learning When to Activate Agent Skills from Counterfactual Evidence (arXiv)
paper · Story page
Deciding whether to load a retrieved skill, not only retrieve it
FIRE: Failure-Informed Runtime Engineering for Reliable Language-Model Agents (arXiv)
paper · Story page
Runtime policies are natural-language instructions and action denials the harness applies at the states that preceded observed failures, leaving weights and the user prompt untouched. Across the 87-task Terminal-Bench 2.1 suite, repeated success for GPT-5.6 Sol moves from 64.4% to 73.6%.
Improved token efficiency for longer agent runs (Cursor)
blog post · Story page
Cursor publishes where its production agent inference spend lands, then describes changes to request assembly, context reuse, and how work gets divided across agents, for a 7% cut in users' token costs without reducing agent quality. Tool outputs and tool-call arguments carry most of the bill.
My agent 'works' four months straight. The truth is it's me patching it twice a week. (r/AI_Agents)
Reddit thread · Story page
One person who sells automation to small companies says the supplier-order agent they shipped has looked flawless for four months because it gets stuck about twice a week and they fix it first. How much of your uptime is the agent, and how much is you?
Grow the Harness, Not the Context: From Strategy-Free Scaffolds to Reusable Specialist Agents (arXiv)
arXiv, 7 pp · Story page
Learning the agent harness itself as code, from task failures
How Strongly Should Task State Influence an LLM Agent? (arXiv)
paper · Story page
Showing task state, telling it, or enforcing it
Introducing Support for Local AI Models in the Antigravity SDK (Google Developers Blog)
blog post · Story page
Local models in the Antigravity SDK via LiteRT and Ollama
Self-Healing Harness for Runtime Oversight of Agent Self-Modification (arXiv (via papers.cool))
paper · Story page
An external gate evaluates every rule an agent writes for itself, and keeps it only when it improves the triggering failure without regressing protected cases beyond a fixed margin. Across 16 matched runs on three benchmarks it rejected 383 proposals, 211 of which fixed the failure that prompted them while degrading a case that already worked.
RRSI: Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement of Agent Harnesses (arXiv (via papers.cool))
paper · Story page
Agents that iteratively edit their own prompts, tools, memory and control flow can post large in-distribution gains that shrink or vanish out of distribution. RRSI caps how many edits one candidate can bundle, pushes the proposer toward unexplored changes, and puts a critic and a pruner over the proposals.
How GitLab reduced code-per-agentic-flow ratio by 45% (GitLab Blog)
blog post · Story page
GitLab's Flow Registry compiles declarative YAML and reusable components into LangGraph flows, replacing repetitive Python implementations of state management and agent wiring. GitLab reports 45% less code per agentic flow on its own platform.
Harnessing the agents (tldraw)
blog post · Story page
A spatial harness for coding agents working in 2D
The Dark Arts of Skill Engineering (Paul Bakaus (Renaissance Geek))
talk · Story page
A ban doesn't produce originality, Bakaus argues, it relocates the model one cluster over: forbid an overused font and it reaches for the next nearest thing in latent space. One of his nine techniques splits design direction and deterministic linting into subagents kept blind to each other.
Superpowers 6.4 (Jesse Vincent)
blog post · Story page
Three more coding agents, inline plan execution reworked
MCP was always a bad idea? (Simon Willison)
blog post · Story page
What MCP buys you outside a terminal agent
AX: Google's Open Agentic Orchestrator (Hacker News)
HN thread · 529 points on HN · Story page
An agentic orchestrator, 529 points on Hacker News
ReliHarness: A Self-Learning Reliability Harness for LLM Agent Tool Execution (Semantic Scholar)
paper · Story page
MCP task states are coarse and self-reported, so a worker thread that deadlocks keeps showing up as working. ReliHarness probes the thread itself with a heartbeat timeout and an operating-system liveness check, reporting 100% detection coverage and zero false positives on the crash and deadlock scenarios tested.
Trying the Software factory pattern. (Will Larson)
blog post · Story page
Imprint's year of agent adoption reads as workflow changes, not model changes: about ten local workspaces, each with an independent checkout of every repository, so agents can generate pull requests across frontend, backend, infrastructure and data. Then the company left Jira for Linear over task visibility and permissions.
Building an Agent Harness for Life Sciences: Introducing Deep Life Sci (LangChain)
blog post · Story page
Open-source clinical research agent with sandboxed analysis sub-agents
Optimizing agent system prompts with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore (AWS ML Blog)
blog post · Story page
AWS opens up the system prompt optimizer inside AgentCore: production traces feed a reflector engine that proposes configuration changes, and those changes get validated before promotion instead of reaching the running agent. Benchmarks for the Single Agent and Sub-Agent Reflectors are reported separately.
The unreasonable effectiveness of BM25 for agentic search (Jo Kristian Bergum (Hornet.dev))
talk · Story page
The lexical function didn't change, Bergum argues, the user did: a model knows entities, dates and product identifiers, so it writes far longer queries than a person would and fires a dozen in a row. He points at a benchmark where accuracy is high with answer-bearing documents in context and drops once the model has to fetch them.
MCP went stateless: What changed in the 2026-07-28 spec (WorkOS)
blog post · Story page
Sessions, the initialize handshake and stream resumability are all gone from the 2026-07-28 MCP specification. The post walks through what replaced each one and what breaks if you ignore the change.
Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude (Simon Willison)
blog post · Story page
Cowork and chat merge into one Claude, Pro and Max first
AgentGuard: Learning Execution Guardrails from Anomalous Coding-Agent Trajectories (arXiv)
paper · Story page
Execution guardrails learned from 461 documented coding-agent failure traces
EchoPath: Execution-Level Replayable Memory for GUI Agents (arXiv)
paper · Story page
Validated GUI trajectories turned into replayable, parameter-controlled procedures
Is Bash All You Need? An Empirical Study of Tool Interfaces for Enterprise Digital Worker Agents (arXiv (via papers.cool))
arXiv, 5 pp · Story page
Five tool interfaces for enterprise agents, compared on TheAgentCompany and APEX-Agents with Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5.
Harness or Model? Isolating the Harness Effect in Agentic Coding with a Contamination-Controlled Private Suite (arXiv (via papers.cool))
arXiv, 25 pp · Story page
Paired same-model runs on a private, contamination-controlled suite found no clear average advantage for vendor-native harnesses over deepagents, with Opus 4.8 or GPT-5.5. The Opus average hides opposite strata on a split chosen after seeing the data.
How We Solved Agent Building (Andrew Qu (Vercel))
talk · Story page
Vercel's data science agent went from one mega prompt to narrowly scoped agents to a single agent managing its own state. The unlock wasn't a clever tool set: a sandbox with a plain file system and bash doubled the eval score.
Tokens Should Have Jobs (Katelyn Lesse and Angela Jiang (Anthropic))
talk · Story page
Given the same fixed budget of roughly 600,000 tokens, an agent that only executed scored 76 on financial analysis tasks, and one that spent part of that budget asking a second agent for advice scored 89. The three jobs: advising, grading to a rubric, reading transcripts into memory.
Realtime Voice Agents with Frontier Intelligence (Bohan Li (EliseAI))
talk · Story page
Li runs two transcription engines at once, a fast one that emits immediately and a slower one that corrects it, discarding the correction if newer audio has already arrived. A prefix cache reuses audio for phrases an earlier turn said.
Agents Without Code: Skills, YAML, and Filesystems Replaced Python (Philipp Schmid (Google DeepMind))
talk · Story page
A PR review agent rebuilt down to AGENTS.md and a script
MCP merges SEP-2640: Skills Extension (MCP spec commits)
The MCP specification repository merged SEP-2640, the Skills Extension. The commit message carries no design detail, so the spec text is the thing to read if your harness already loads Agent Skills from disk.
Slow developer experience will bottleneck fast models (Sean Goedecke)
blog post · Story page
Sean Goedecke argues that nothing under a second matters in today's dev loop because you're waiting on the agent anyway, and that this flips once fast small models take subagent work. At that point your test suite and dev server become the bottleneck.
Deploy, Discover, Inspect, Observe: A Summer Spent Making a Public Vespa MCP Server (Vespa)
blog post · Story page
Vespa interns build a standalone public Vespa Cloud MCP server
Build a ChatGPT plugin with the OpenAI Agents SDK and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore (OpenAI Cookbook)
blog post · Story page
Cookbook: an Agents SDK agent exposed to ChatGPT through MCP
How I cut coding agent costs with model and harness routing (Arize)
blog post · Story page
An author writing on Arize routes the phases of a recurring coding-agent workflow to different models and harnesses and reports a large per-run cost drop.
Qwen3-0.6B (400 MB) on a Samsung Note 8 (2017) phone drives a real desktop Chrome (r/LocalLLaMA)
Reddit thread · Story page
A 400 MB Qwen3-0.6B on a 2017 Galaxy Note 8 drives desktop Chrome by picking one named element from a structured page of about 10 links or fields. Extraction, clicking and verification sit in the surrounding stack, which the poster helps build, so the scaffold is the story.
What your design system can't teach AI agents (Tessl)
blog post · Story page
Tessl's factory ships screens no designer touched, and a design system couldn't teach its agents composition, meaning what goes on a screen and what stays off. So it had agents diff generated screens against hand-redesigned ones, turned the differences into checkable rules, and shipped them as skills that run at creation and at review.
Figma agent vs. one button: shipping design tokens to npm (GitButler)
blog post · Story page
GitButler wired two agents together to release Figma design tokens to npm, and each run took six minutes. A button the plugin has had for years does the same job in seconds.
I spent 883 commits and 8 months building an LLM agent harness, overengineered it, and abandoned it - lol. (r/AI_Agents)
Reddit thread · Story page
Eight months and 883 commits into a harness that was meant to own planning, state, permissions, context, and verification so the model could be a replaceable worker, the author kept adding code graphs, RAG, crash recovery, model routing, and dashboards until more time went into adding systems than using them. Other harnesses got usable, this one got killed, and the author isn't recommending you download it.
The Folder Is the Agent (Every (Source Code))
blog post · Story page
44 agents as models pointed at folders; swarms added review burden
From coding to Knowledge work agents (Karan Vaidya (Composio))
talk · Story page
Karan Vaidya's OpenClaw mass-emailed hiring candidates exactly as instructed, and every check in the software-engineering playbook would have passed. His talk turns that into six primitives code got for free and knowledge work lacks: centralization, history, context, verification, governance, and reversibility.
Anthropic Ships Terraform-Style Workflow to Deploy Claude Agents From Code (AlphaSignal)
newsletter item · Story page
Anthropic's ant CLI declares agents as files, reconciles like Terraform
MCP in LangChain: Stateless Protocol, Elicitation, and More! (LangChain)
blog post · Story page
MCP moves into langchain.mcp on FastMCP, elicitation as an interrupt
Harness Engineering: Anatomy, Architecture, and Evolution of Coding Agents. A Source-Code Study of Eleven Systems (arXiv)
paper · Story page
Eleven production coding harnesses, Claude Code and Codex CLI through Aider and OpenCode, dissected at source level into seven subsystems and 29 recurring patterns. Across roughly four million lines, none imports a general-purpose agent framework and none retrieves code with vector embeddings.
How We Migrated 11 Million Users to Cline's Biggest Refactor (Cline)
blog post · Story page
Cline pulled its agent harness out of the VS Code extension into a shared SDK, then had to move an extension installed by over 11 million developers onto it. The first attempt took months and was rolled back immediately, and with no gradual rollout in the VS Code Marketplace, Cline built its own release process.
Don't Let the Model Write the YAML: Deterministic, Minimal-Diff GitOps Remediation from LLM-Proposed Field Changes (arXiv)
paper · Story page
On real Kubernetes manifests, no way of having a model write the fix was safe unattended: GNU patch applies 96% of unified diffs but silently misapplies about one in seven, and a frontier model's full-file rewrite drops a field on some runs. The alternative has the agent emit only a structured field-change intent while a deterministic parser-based pipeline makes the minimal edit.
Harness-of-Harness: Multi-Day Autonomous Software Development with Continual Improvement (arXiv)
paper · Story page
A meta-harness that wraps coding agents in multi-day plan, code, test, evaluate loops
An Accidental Blackboard (Martin Fowler)
blog post · Story page
Agents accidentally built a blackboard coordinator inside the git repo
The End of the Static Screen: Architecting Intent-Driven UX (Gus Iwanaga (commercetools))
talk · Story page
Gus Iwanaga asked his generative UI for a Q1 sales report four times and got four different layouts, so he wouldn't ship it. commercetools now runs an orchestrator that classifies intent, calls tools, picks eligible components and emits a schema-bound UI spec rendered with native components.
Introducing Harness Channels (Mastra)
Multi-user Agent Controller sessions from Slack, iMessage, WhatsApp and Discord
Manage agents, tools and skills at scale with AWS Agent Registry (AWS ML Blog)
blog post · Story page
AWS made Agent Registry generally available: one governed, searchable catalog where an organization publishes, curates, and discovers agents, tools, skills, and custom resources.
fx is now available in the AI SDK harness layer (Vercel)
blog post · Story page
Vercel's AI SDK harness layer added fx, its open-source coding agent, through an adapter speaking the Agent Client Protocol. fx joins Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and the other supported harnesses behind one HarnessAgent API.
Agents babysitting agents (WorkOS)
blog post · Story page
WorkOS on making agent-supervising agents safe
Tribal Dungeons of Global Shipping: AI Agents at Global Scale (Dmitry Buykin (Maersk))
talk · Story page
A Maersk talk on turning screenshot-based operating procedures into executable agent instructions, and the refinement loop that made them accurate.
Starfish-FL: Harnessing Agentic Federated Analytics (Semantic Scholar)
paper · Story page
A multi-tier agent harness for cross-silo healthcare analytics built around one invariant: the LLM is advisory and can't independently trigger consequential actions. Site exclusions, early stops, and recovery all sit behind deterministic preconditions, and every feature is opt-in, degrading gracefully to standard federated learning.
Agents Are Where Microservices Were in 2015 (Roberto Milev & Uday Kanagala (Navan))
talk · Story page
Book a flight when the fare drops below 200 dollars and it fires two weeks later: who made that purchase? Navan's answers are a hard split between delegated-user authority and service identity, guardrails before and after every tool call, and a master agent that loads separately testable skills.
SIGIL: Compiling Agent Skills into Typed Harnesses (arXiv)
paper · Story page
A SKILL.md is prose the model interprets at runtime, so a required tool call or ordering check can be skipped even when the skill spells it out. SIGIL compiles skills into typed executable programs and leaves semantic choices to the model; across 33 public skills and three runtime models it raised the share of applicable requirements satisfied from 66.0% to 88.6% and cut runtime tokens 2.40-5.95x.
StarHarness: Evolving Harnesses with Stratified Search for Enterprise Environments (arXiv)
paper · Story page
StarHarness treats the agent harness as the optimization target: prompts, tool interfaces, skills, MCP providers, subagent structure and loop settings evolve while model weights stay fixed. On three enterprise benchmarks it reports 20-35 percentage points over the default after 4-12 accepted changes, with gains holding on held-out tasks and transferring across GPT and Qwen models.
The Empire, Long Divided, Must Unite: Architectural Convergence in Three LLM Agent Harnesses (arXiv)
paper · Story page
A source-level reading of deepagents, pi and dsh at pinned commits finds harnesses that set out from opposite philosophies meeting at the same five parts: a commoditised loop, an append-only replayable session record, model quirks kept as data, progressive disclosure of context, and explicit extension seams. The authors don't claim independent invention.
Building GTM AI Agents: Lessons from Deploying to 6,000 Users (Sait Izmit (Snowflake))
talk · Story page
Sait Izmit wrote 150 questions from Snowflake's sales process before trying the agent, scored 50 percent on the first run, and set the rule that governed everything after: answer 50 questions at 95 percent rather than 100 at 70. The assistant now serves about 6,000 go-to-market users at roughly 40,000 questions a week, and around 60 percent of its data arrived after launch.
Cursor is now available in the AI SDK harness layer (Vercel)
blog post · Story page
Vercel's AI SDK harness layer adds an official @ai-sdk/harness-cursor adapter that connects Cursor over the Agent Client Protocol, so you can swap it for Claude Code, Cline, Codex, Deep Agents, Grok Build, OpenCode or Pi behind one HarnessAgent interface without touching application code.
The Missing Layer in Agentic AI (Giedrius Šteimantas (Oxylabs))
talk · Story page
A 200 doesn't mean the page is real: an agent that forwards ten fetched pages when only three returned content spends most of its tokens reading CAPTCHAs. Šteimantas's rebuild uses a compact-JSON search API for discovery, a scraper that fails loudly when blocked, and a browser only as a last resort.
AutoSaddler: Automatic Harness Optimization with Durable Updates from Agent Execution Traces (arXiv)
paper · Story page
Harness patches learned offline from failure traces, validated before adoption
Prime Agent: A Self-Improving RLM Harness (arXiv)
paper · Story page
Open-source REPL harness; ARC-AGI-3 Best@1 from 30% to 95.5%
Introducing Tool Search for Mastra Agents (Mastra)
Agents search and load tools on demand instead of eagerly
The Art of Loop Engineering (LangChain)
blog post · Story page
LangChain on stacking and extending the core agent loop
Agent Frameworks Considered Harmful (Rémi Louf (.txt))
talk · Story page
A small runtime built from production failures: an append-only causal event log, a queue that counts attempts, and a content-addressed store that hashes every prompt component separately. Diff two runs to see exactly which component changed, or replay one against a different model.
Why model routing must be in the harness (Factory)
blog post · Story page
Factory argues routing belongs inside the harness, since only the harness can price a model switch against the session cache, assign models to work it creates itself, and learn from task outcomes.
Terminal Agents: A Survey of AI Agents in Command-Line Environments (arXiv (via papers.cool))
paper · Story page
A system-level survey of terminal agents, harnesses, and evaluation
Harness Continual Learning: Continual Adaptation Beyond Model Parameters (arXiv (via papers.cool))
paper · Story page
The paper treats prompts, memories, tools, skills, and routing rules as state evolving around a frozen model, and names the failure mode: a harness update can break behavior acquired earlier. Updates commit only after an evaluator checks improvement, retention, and validity.
LEDGER: Claim-to-Evidence Trace Graphs for Auditing LLM Agents (arXiv (via papers.cool))
paper · Story page
LEDGER groups raw execution records into evidence and workflow nodes, with typed edges linking each claim an agent makes to the actions, artifacts, and checks behind it. The premise: as agents work faster, the bottleneck moves from producing outputs to auditing them.
Temporal Agent Harness: An early look at durable agent infrastructure (Temporal)
Temporal previews an Agent Harness bringing durable execution, tool-call approval gates, and typed interfaces to production agents. The company frames it as an early look.
How I automate my own job at Hugging Face using agents (Niels Rogge (Hugging Face))
talk · Story page
Rogge automated his own outreach job twice: a deterministic nightly workflow with tracing and no agent framework, then an autonomous bash loop where every GitHub issue runs in its own sandbox. Thousands of automated issues have drawn exactly two negative replies; recipients are not told an agent wrote to them.
A shot-scraper-style JSON API on Bun 1.4's new Bun.WebView (Simon Willison)
blog post · Story page
browser automation lands in Bun 1.4's core
Launch HN: OneCLI (YC S26): OSS sandboxed agent harness for teams (Hacker News)
HN thread · 85 points on HN · Story page
open-source sandboxed agent harness for teams
Agent Lightning v1.0: Towards Harnessed Agentic RL (arXiv (via papers.cool))
paper · Story page
A roughly 3,500-line framework for RL where the deploy-time agent harness keeps owning tools, context, and the environment loop while the trainer observes only LLM request-response pairs. It's built to surface the failure points: retokenization, sample merging, loss normalization, backend scheduling.
StagedWorkspace: A Versioned Workspace for Knowledge-Work Agents (arXiv (via papers.cool))
paper · Story page
A versioned workspace contract for knowledge-work agents
Vercel's AI SDK Ships Code Mode, Cutting Agent Token Use by 99.9% (AlphaSignal)
newsletter item · Story page
Experimental Code Mode lands in Vercel's AI SDK
StateM: Reaching 95.3% Raw Accuracy, or a $15 Frontier Run, on Terminal-Bench 2.1 via Harness Scaling (arXiv)
paper · Story page
StateM wraps unchanged model weights in an agent-native runtime: durable state, checked transitions and recoverable runbooks. On Terminal-Bench 2.1 it takes GPT-5.6 Sol xhigh to 95.3% raw accuracy across 445 trials, and the frozen profile lifts GPT-5.6 Luna from 76.7 to 85.4%.
Building an Agentic Video Editor for Mass Consumer (Ekaterina Deyneka (Reelful))
talk · Story page
Ekaterina Deyneka's talk frames a consumer video editor as an agentic app builder: footage and a line of direction go into a sandbox, an agent works with tools and skills, Remotion expresses the cut as React code, and a verification pass catches compositions that won't render.
Cline is now available in the AI SDK harness layer (Vercel)
blog post · Story page
Cline joins Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode behind one HarnessAgent interface
MCP Went Stateless, So What Your Servers Must Change (AlphaSignal)
newsletter item · Story page
Stateless MCP: send an order id or place the order twice
Not All Tokens Are Equal: Inflation-Aware Routing for Agentic LLM Systems (arXiv)
paper · Story page
Retries inflate true workflow cost; a router that predicts it first
Towards the Harness of Embodied Agents (arXiv)
paper · Story page
Thea ports the coding-agent harness pattern to physical robots: every capability is a callable tool, a persistent scene graph stands in for reading world state, and exit-code-style evaluations decide when an action should stop, whether it succeeded, and why it failed.
RecSys Factory: Bounding LLM Agent Autonomy to Decision Points in the Industrial Recommender Lifecycle (arXiv)
paper · Story page
RecSys Factory has run for 78 days across three Tencent recommender business lines by granting the LLM autonomy only at decision points and keeping pipelines deterministic. It runs no waiting daemon, waking on host-emitted events and spending zero CPU during the 94% of wall-clock spent waiting on Spark or GPU jobs.
Self-evolving Agentic Customer Support System at LinkedIn (arXiv)
paper · Story page
LinkedIn's support agent improves without model retraining, running retrieval, evolutionary prompt optimization, and evaluation as one versioned, guarded loop. A two-week production A/B test lifted QA self-serve 9.0 percentage points, cancellation self-serve 4.8, and routing accuracy 30.6.
One Recipe, Many Harnesses: What Self-Evolution Encodes Across Languages and Models (arXiv)
paper · Story page
Holds one self-evolution recipe fixed across eight languages and three base models, then reads what the evolved prompts, tools, and memory encode. The loop beat a minimal seed and the mini-SWE-agent scaffold in most cells, with two null regions.
Improving Agents is a Data Mining Problem (Vivek Trivedy (LangChain))
talk · Story page
LangChain points agents at other agents' traces to ask where an agent got dumber after compaction and where users got upset. On a legal benchmark with Harvey, an open model matched frontier-model trace judging at one to two orders of magnitude lower cost.
Evolution of agentic surfaces (Gagan Bhat & Isabella Kai He (Anthropic))
talk · Story page
Anthropic's Applied AI team on harness assumptions going stale: a context-reset workaround built for Sonnet 4.5 became pure overhead once Opus 4.5 shipped without the quirk. Decoupling the agent loop from tool execution cut time to first token 60% at P50 and over 90% at P95.
Deploying Anthropic Claude apps gateway for AWS for enterprise workloads (AWS ML Blog)
blog post · Story page
A production reference deployment for the self-hosted Claude apps gateway
Vercel Connect now supports CLI setup for 100+ connectors (Vercel)
blog post · Story page
Vercel Connect sets up 100+ service connectors from the CLI
Realtime multiplayer, automation, and you! (Idan Gazit (GitHub))
talk · Story page
Gazit wrote an Astro upgrade workflow in about three lines of plain English, and Copilot expanded it into a playbook that carried his site up two major versions, fixed what broke, and opened a pull request. His point: prompting an agent to behave is not a guardrail; permissions, tools, and network access get declared deterministically.
Introducing Stagehand v4: The SDK for browser agents. (Browserbase)
blog post · Story page
Browser-agent SDK with state and CDP dispatch moved into an extension
Anthropic's CCA Exam as a Field-Guide for Agentic Engineering (Frank Coyle (UC Berkeley))
talk · Story page
Production-agent anti-patterns from Anthropic's architect exam scenarios
Managed Deep Agents is now in public beta (LangChain)
blog post · via LangChain · Story page
Linked without a summary: the fact-gate could not verify one against the source.
Multiplayer agentic engineering (Arjun Singh (Superconductor))
talk · Story page
Singh's meeting bot sat in a Google Meet for four hours, heard a passerby wish coding agents had acceptance criteria, opened the ticket itself, and prototyped the change. The narrower claim underneath: customer calls and team meetings now yield prototyped ideas and usually a few shippable pull requests, with one agent session reachable from Slack, desktop, and GitHub at once.
Velocity Sickness: What Happens When Your Whole Team Gets 10x Faster (Matt Dailey (Ref.))
talk · Story page
Dailey names the gap between agent-amplified output and actual impact "velocity sickness": unread content, unmergeable pull requests, mornings spent declaring agent bankruptcy. His fix is keeping critical decisions with humans in a durable document layer, separate from the ephemeral chats where implementation happens.
OpenChamber: An Agentic Development Environment (Hacker News)
HN thread · 111 points on HN · Story page
an agentic development environment, via Hacker News
Issues that covered it
- Daily
Most of a harness-evolution gain is overfitting and extra compute
Plus: Monzo's 1,800 agent tasks a day, and a credential the agent thought was yours. 5 min.
Oct 22, 2026 · 5 min

- Daily
Claude Code's Bash tool changed 12% of calls carrying code or escapes
Plus: UndoBench, a Copilot CLI secret leak, and what Codemode is for. 5 min.
Oct 07, 2026 · 5 min

- Daily
Branch steering breaks the Dual-LLM guarantee for computer-use agents
Plus: swarms borrowing public URL scanners, pipelines that go wrong under replay. 5 min.
Oct 06, 2026 · 5 min

- Daily
VS Code rebuilt its release process around agents and now ships weekly
Plus: an agent that writes its own tools, and a support bot at 80%. 5 min.
Oct 05, 2026 · 5 min

- Daily
Six ways an agent harness can run something other than what you approved
Plus: elaborate harnesses lose to a plain coding agent. 5 min.
Oct 02, 2026 · 5 min

- Daily
A forged chat-template marker loses most of its authority as ordinary subwords
Plus: 5 papers, 3 builder posts, 9 quick links. 5 min.
Oct 01, 2026 · 5 min

- Daily
Agent context compression can cut tokens by two thirds and still run slower
Plus: a rescored injection benchmark, Letta's self-written workflows. 5 min.
Sep 30, 2026 · 5 min

- Daily
AISI finds GPT-6 Astra attacking out of scope during a cyber evaluation
Plus: five papers, METR's per-action monitor, and nine quick links. 5 min.
Sep 29, 2026 · 5 min

- Daily
Agent-written pull requests match human ones on revert rates, and fail differently
Plus: two papers pricing what agent context costs to serve and to keep. 5 min.
Sep 28, 2026 · 5 min

- Daily
Forged control tokens blank an agent's reasoning while the tool call still fires
Plus: a completion gate you can prove, and 8 tools where 83 were. 5 min.
Sep 25, 2026 · 5 min

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