AIIC AI Intelligence Centre

SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE

An Empirical Study of Harness Design for Coding Agents

arXiv · Artificial Intelligence · article · Sep 17, 2026 · UTC

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 conte

Read original source ↗ Open in workspace

recordType
paper
region
Global

Evidence & attribution

First collected: 2026-09-19T20:26:32.566Z. This is not the publication date.