Harness-only changes lift deepagents-cli from 52.8% to 66.5% on Terminal-Bench 2.0

Gauri_the_great · x · 2026-09-07

Agent harnesses and infrastructure are an active engineering field. LangChain kept GPT-5.2-Codex fixed and lifted deepagents-cli on Terminal-Bench 2.0 from 52.8% to 66.5% using harness changes only: injecting environment context, enforcing a build–verify–fix loop, adding loop/timeout guards, and allocating reasoning budget by phase. The author argues that for agents running for hours, checkpointing, sandboxing, retries, tool permissions, tracing, and verification determine success — model intelligence is only one part. Ends with a joke that Fable 5.1 one-shots the whole task anyway.

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