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Concept

Instance-Dependent Harness Demands

Instance-dependent harness demands refer to the principle that optimal agent execution scaffolds vary not only across broader task domains, but across individual problem instances. Different computational tasks inherently require distinct structural priors:

  • Wide-search tasks benefit from parallel evidence exploration workflows.
  • Terminal and command-line tasks favor lean, serial ReAct execution loops.
  • Deep-research tasks require structured working memory to manage and synthesize retrieved evidence.
  • Repository-level coding tasks require filesystem mediation to organize code patches, unit tests, execution traces, and repository states.

Because of these disparate demands, optimizing a single ahead-of-time scaffold across heterogeneous tasks is cumbersome and necessitates searching an expansive design space with no guarantee of matching the next task's structure.

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Updated 2026-09-25

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Prep Sessions

Adaptive Agent Runtimes: Architecture, Synthesis, and State Control @ University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Ch.1 Agent Harness Principles and Architecture - Adaptive Agent Runtimes: Architecture, Synthesis, and State Control @ University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Ahead-of-Time versus Just-in-Time Harness Construction - Adaptive Agent Runtimes: Architecture, Synthesis, and State Control @ University of Michigan - Ann Arbor