New paper defines four conditions that turn an LLM into a coding agent
alex_verem · x · 2026-07-22
A new paper argues that a language model becomes a coding agent only when a harness provides four things: a runtime loop that interleaves reasoning, action, and observation; a tool interface to act on the environment; active context management; and execution-state tracking.
The paper traces the term harness back to the horse-tack metaphor and claims the agent is not the model itself but the surrounding infrastructure that connects, controls, and measures it. The screenshot shows the paper’s abstract framing this as a formal definition of agent harnesses for software engineering.
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