An Empirical Study of Harness Design for Coding Agents
Coding harnesses shape how autonomous coding agents translate model capabilities into long-horizon software-engineering performance, yet existing work typically evaluates harnesses as monolithic systems, leaving the effectiveness of individual components unclear. To enable component-level comparisons, we study this question with a lightweight coding harness whose execution loop is fixed while three components are varied: planning, action space, and context management. Across four models evaluated on SWE-Bench Verified and Terminal-Bench 2.1, we evaluate 176 matched settings spanning five context-management strategies, four context-window budgets, and targeted ablations of planning and act...
| Authors | Run-Ze Fan, Zihao Zhang, Simin Ma et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 17 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 September 2026 |
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