Herding CATs: ALARA for Agent Harness Engineering in Portable Composable Multi-Agent Teams
Christopher J. Agostino, Nayan D'Souza

TL;DR
This paper introduces a plain-text data layer called CAT that improves management, sharing, and coordination of multi-agent systems by allowing direct control over agent tools and behaviors.
Contribution
It applies the ALARA principle to agent context management, enabling scalable, transparent, and collaborative control of agent tool access and configurations.
Findings
CAT enables real agentic usage with a command-line shell.
Evaluated 22 models across 115 tasks, identifying success and failure patterns.
Characterized model performance and breakdowns across tasks and model sizes.
Abstract
Industry practitioners and academic researchers regularly use multi-agent systems to accelerate their work, but the applications through which users operate these systems do not provide a simple, unified mechanism for scalably managing critical components of the agent harness. This lack of control adversely impacts both the quality of individual human-agent interactions and reduces the capacity for practitioners to coordinate context engineering efforts. The behavioral specifications that define what agents in such systems can do remain fragmented across prose instruction files -- for which compliance cannot be guaranteed -- or framework-internal configurations, making these specifications difficult to share, version, or collaboratively maintain across teams and projects. Applying the ALARA principle from radiation safety (exposures kept as low as reasonably achievable) to context, we…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsMulti-Agent Systems and Negotiation · Business Process Modeling and Analysis · Mobile Agent-Based Network Management
