{ "schema_version": 1, "builder_plan": { "scenario": "Your coding assistant makes changes that still need substantial repair before merging.", "change": "Try the technique on held-out issues from a repository with reliable tests.", "baseline": "The same coding agent, repository snapshot, tools, and token budget.", "steps": [ "Locate the paper's implementation and check its license, model support, data needs, and hardware requirements. Stop here if you cannot obtain the required artifacts.", "Save a small set of representative product tasks and expected outcomes. Keep evaluation tasks out of any training or tuning, and choose quality and cost limits before running.", "Run the baseline and the proposed change on identical inputs. Keep other settings fixed and repeat paired runs to expose variation.", "Save per-task outputs, failures, timings, and all usage costs. Review regressions before expanding the test." ], "measure": "Correct patches, regression failures, human repair time, and total cost per accepted change.", "decision": "Keep the change only if it meets your preselected quality and latency limits and improves the metric you care about after setup and operating costs. Otherwise retain the baseline. This is an exploration plan, not a validated recommendation." }, "builder_review": null, "arxiv_id": "2609.32459", "title": "Beyond the Model: Demystifying Harness Effects in Software Engineering Agents", "summary": "The study replaces the assumption that agent performance is a property of the base model alone, evaluating harness components (tool registry, context compression, explicit planning, subagents, lazy skills) as first-class design decisions on top of existing open-weight models and benchmarks. 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