Complex Agents, Shallow Tests: Demystifying and Enhancing Test Adequacy of Agent Harness in the Wild

Agent harness bugs exhibit unique characteristics and remain challenging for state-of-the-art software agents to repair. Progress in this area is further hindered by existing benchmarks, which contain only a small and fixed number of executable harness bugs while requiring hundreds of human hours to construct. This work presents AgentBug-Smith, an automated harness bug reproduction approach that continuously discovers and reproduces real-world harness bugs from open-source agentic systems. Across different backbone LLMs, AgentBug-Smith consistently outperforms existing bug reproduction techniques designed for general software, achieving 10.67% - 27.56% higher success rates of reproducing harness bugs. By applying AgentBug-Smith to open-source agentic systems in the wild, we construct Live-Harness-Bench, a live and extensible benchmark that currently contains 200 reproducible harness bugs. We further demonstrate the utility of Live-Harness-Bench through two downstream applications. First, we use Live-Harness-Bench as the evaluation benchmark to systematically evaluate state-of-the-art software agents, revealing their limited capabilities in repairing real-world harness bugs. Second, we use Live-Harness-Bench as a knowledge base of real-world harness bug fixes, from which reusable repair skills can be distilled to improve existing software agents, increasing their harness-bug repair rates by 6.32%. Together, AgentBug-Smith and Live-Harness-Bench establish a scalable foundation for continuously evaluating and improving software agents on harness bug repair, turning real-world agent failures into executable evaluation instances and reusable knowledge for harness improvement, thus contributing to the ultimate goal of recursively self-improving agents.

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 agents are increasingly used to solve real-world problems, and their effectiveness depends on both the underlying models and the harnesses that support their operation. However, most existing benchmarks focus on model capabilities and overall agent performance, with limited attention to the evaluation of agent harnesses. To address this gap, we introduce TraceTrial-Bench, which organizes harness reliability into seven components covering context, execution, governance, lifecycle, observability, tools, and verification. We construct 95 expert-level, mechanism-oriented tasks with executable or state-based ground truth to support semantically equivalent comparisons while preserving the native behavior of each harness. We design a Trajectory Tracing (TT) module to capture agent execution traces and introduce a two-layer evaluation framework that separately assesses agent performance and harness reliability. In addition, we design a Multi-source Evidence Acquisition (MEA) module to provide evidence from the agent context, harness, and execution environment for LLM-based evaluation, and develop a Failure Attribution (FA) module that uses explicit mechanism chains to support attribution at the run level. Across 4 harnesses, 9 models, and 95 tasks, our evaluation of 3,420 runs yields macro-averaged harness scores ranging from 59.8% to 72.0%, while 31.1% of runs achieve task success despite failing at least one harness criterion. TraceTrial-Bench provides an auditable and reproducible foundation for comparing agent harnesses, diagnosing their failures, and studying how harness design interacts with model behavior.