The Last Harness You'll Ever Build

TL;DR

This paper introduces a two-level automated framework that evolves and meta-optimizes AI task harnesses, reducing manual engineering and enabling rapid adaptation to new domains.

Contribution

It presents a novel hierarchical framework that automates harness engineering and meta-optimizes the process across diverse tasks, eliminating manual design efforts.

Findings

The framework automates harness design for complex AI tasks.

Meta-evolution learns a blueprint for rapid adaptation.

It formalizes the process with algorithms inspired by meta-learning.

Abstract

AI agents are increasingly deployed on complex, domain-specific workflows -- navigating enterprise web applications that require dozens of clicks and form fills, orchestrating multi-step research pipelines that span search, extraction, and synthesis, automating code review across unfamiliar repositories, and handling customer escalations that demand nuanced domain knowledge. \textbf{Each new task domain requires painstaking, expert-driven harness engineering}: designing the prompts, tools, orchestration logic, and evaluation criteria that make a foundation model effective. We present a two-level framework that automates this process. At the first level, the \textbf{Harness Evolution Loop} optimizes a worker agent's harness $\mathcal{H}$ for a single task: a Worker Agent $W_{\mathcal{H}}$ executes the task, an Evaluator Agent $V$ adversarially diagnoses failures and scores performance, and an Evolution Agent $E$ modifies the harness based on the full history of prior attempts. At the second level, the \textbf{Meta-Evolution Loop} optimizes the evolution blueprint $\Lambda = (W_{\mathcal{H}}, \mathcal{H}^{(0)}, V, E)$ itself across diverse tasks, \textbf{learning a blueprint $\Lambda^{(\text{best})}$ that enables rapid harness convergence on any new task -- so that adapting an agent to a novel domain requires no human harness engineering at all.} We formalize the correspondence to meta-learning and present both algorithms. The framework \textbf{shifts manual harness engineering into automated harness engineering}, and takes one step further -- \textbf{automating the design of the automation itself}.