Harness Handbook: Making Evolving Agent Harnesses Readable,Navigable, and Editable
The paper argues that agent harness work is bottlenecked by finding the right code, not just writing the patch.
It introduces Harness Handbook, an automatically generated, behavior-centered map from an agent harness to the source locations that implement each behavior. The authors pair it with Behavior-Guided Progressive Disclosure, which leads agents from broad behaviors down to verified implementation details. In tests on modification requests across two open-source harnesses, the approach improved localization and edit-plan quality while using fewer planner tokens. HF Daily Papers' note
It introduces Harness Handbook, an automatically generated, behavior-centered map from an agent harness to the source locations that implement each behavior. The authors pair it with Behavior-Guided Progressive Disclosure, which leads agents from broad behaviors down to verified implementation details. In tests on modification requests across two open-source harnesses, the approach improved localization and edit-plan quality while using fewer planner tokens. HF Daily Papers' note
score 5