The Last Harness You'll Ever Build
Abstract
AI agents are increasingly deployed on complex, domain-specific workflows -- navigating enterprise web applications that require dozens of clicks and form fills, orchestrating multi-step research pipelines that span search, extraction, and synthesis, automating code review across unfamiliar repositories, and handling customer escalations that demand nuanced domain knowledge. \textbf{Each new task domain requires painstaking, expert-driven harness engineering}: designing the prompts, tools, orchestration logic, and evaluation criteria that make a foundation model effective. We present a two-level framework that automates this process. At the first level, the \textbf{Harness Evolution Loop} optimizes a worker agent's harness for a single task: a Worker Agent executes the task, an Evaluator Agent adversarially diagnoses failures and scores performance, and an Evolution Agent modifies the harness based on the full history of prior attempts. At the second level, the \textbf{Meta-Evolution Loop} optimizes the evolution blueprint itself across diverse tasks, \textbf{learning a blueprint that enables rapid harness convergence on any new task -- so that adapting an agent to a novel domain requires no human harness engineering at all.} We formalize the correspondence to meta-learning and present both algorithms. The framework \textbf{shifts manual harness engineering into automated harness engineering}, and takes one step further -- \textbf{automating the design of the automation itself}.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.21003,
title = {The Last Harness You'll Ever Build},
author = {Haebin Seong and Li Yin and Haoran Zhang and Zhan Shi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.21003},
year = {2026}
}