An Empirical Study of Harness Design for Coding Agents

A new empirical study examines how coding harness design affects autonomous coding agents' long-horizon software-engineering performance, arguing that prior work evaluates harnesses as monolithic systems and leaves the effectiveness of individual components unclear. The study is framed to enable component-level comparison of harness components.

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 comparison