The Crucial Role of Coding Agent Harnesses
matei_zaharia · x · 2026-07-09
Databricks tested various coding agents on their internal codebase and found that harness design significantly impacts both cost and performance. A simple Pi harness achieved a success rate comparable to vendor-provided harnesses but at half the cost, partly due to a smaller context being fed into the model.
They also emphasized that cheap per-token pricing does not mean cheap per-task. Some models might be cheaper per token, but because they consume significantly more tokens, the final task cost is higher and the quality is worse.
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