Component-Level Analysis of Coding Agent Harness Design
September 16, 2026
An empirical study identifies how planning, action space, and context management independently impact long-horizon software engineering performance. Testing across 176 settings on SWE-Bench Verified shows that context management value scales with context-window budgets.
HOW THIS AFFECTS YOU
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builderYou can optimize agent performance by tuning context management and action spaces rather than just increasing model size.
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researcherThis provides a methodology to isolate specific harness components for more granular agent evaluation.