HarnessOpt-Bench: Evaluating LLMs at Harness Optimization

As agents move from research prototypes to deployed tools, their capability increasingly depends on model-external execution infrastructure, commonly termed the agent harness. Changing this harness while holding model weights fixed can substantially alter task performance. Current agent evaluations typically report downstream performance under a chosen harness, leaving a model's ability to develop the harness itself comparatively underexplored. We introduce HarnessDev, a benchmark that shifts the unit of evaluation from task outputs to runnable infrastructure. HarnessDev covers two stages. In Creation, the agent starts from a minimal seed and a small number of cases, then builds a complete execution system. In Evolution, it starts from its own created harness and iteratively revises it using downstream execution feedback, with the goal of improving benchmark performance. We then evaluate each constructed harness on capability (task success on held-out benchmarks) and efficiency (execution-token cost). The reported Creation results cover six creator LLMs, four domains, and five downstream benchmarks totaling 2,207 unique downstream instances, with hidden evaluation tasks withheld from development. We find that generated harnesses remain substantially behind mature human-engineered references on code and on search and research, while matching or exceeding the selected references on writing and machine-learning experimentation, with large variation in execution cost. Evolution produces some performance gains, but they are unstable and transfer only partially to held-out tasks. Experiments with a fixed runtime model further show that the gains depend strongly on the model executing the harness, indicating limited transfer across models.

LLM agents are increasingly deployed as executable systems that use tools, modify workspaces, and produce concrete artifacts. In such workflows, performance depends not only on the base model, but also on the harness: the system layer that manages context, tools, state, constraints, permissions, tracing, and recovery. However, existing benchmarks typically abstract away execution, compare complete agent systems, or hold the harness fixed, making execution-layer variation difficult to study. We introduce Harness-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating configuration-level harness effects in realistic agent workflows. Harness-Bench evaluates representative harness configurations across multiple model backends under shared task environments, budgets, and evaluation protocols, while preserving each harness's native execution behavior. The benchmark contains 106 sandboxed offline tasks constructed from practical agent-use patterns and manually reviewed for realism, solvability, oracle-checkability, and integrity. Each run records final artifacts, execution traces, usage statistics, and validator outputs, enabling analysis beyond final completion. Across 5,194 execution trajectories, we observe substantial variation in completion, process quality, efficiency, and failure behavior across model-harness pairings. These results suggest that agent capability should be reported at the model-harness configuration level rather than attributed to the base model alone. Our analysis further identifies recurring execution-alignment failures, where plausible reasoning becomes decoupled from tool feedback, workspace state, evidence, or verifiable output contracts. Harness-Bench provides a reproducible foundation for diagnosing and improving reliable, efficient, and auditable agent execution stacks.

LLM tool agents can be improved without retraining by modifying the runtime harness around a fixed model: prompts, tool interfaces, middleware, state handling, and recovery logic. We study this setting as resource-bounded harness selection for fixed-model multi-turn tool agents, with the search surface scoped to prompts and tool-boundary middleware: edits are guarded intercepts at the tool boundary, not arbitrary rewriting of agent execution logic. Our optimizer-agnostic protocol reports mean held-out lift, worst-condition lift, repeatability, logged cost diagnostics, and RelLift95(B), a conservative estimate of the held-out gain of the harness selected under budget B. We instantiate the protocol with prompt-only and prompt-plus-middleware optimizers, including PRISM, which clusters failures and routes repairs to prompt, tool-boundary middleware, or joint edit surfaces within a Pareto search. On BFCL multi-round, tau2-Retail, and tau2-Telecom, PRISM obtains mean held-out lifts of 14.2, 14.9, and 10.1 percentage points and positive empirical RelLift95 on all three benchmarks, and a component ablation attributes the margin chiefly to failure-surface routing and the edit-pattern constraint. Across optimizers, the results show that some search procedures can occasionally find large gains but still choose brittle updates, so the reliability of the chosen harness should be reported alongside average held-out lift.