Latest / Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp
The Loop and the Hands: What a Coding Harness Is (Harness Design, Part 1)
Platform engineer Ines Varga doubles her coding agent's success rate without changing the model, and her mentor Gideon Achterberg uses it to explain the harness: the loop, the tools and the guard rails around a model with no memory. We trace the history from ReAct to SWE-agent's agent-computer interface, tour OpenHands, Aider, mini-swe-agent and the commercial agents, then go inside the harness from 'An Empirical Study of Harness Design for Coding Agents' (arXiv:2609.20804). In that study, predefined tools scaffold weaker models (worth 15 points on SWE-Bench Verified for Nemotron-3 30B)…
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