# From General Agents to RCA Experts: A Self-Evolving Harness for Root Cause Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25661 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25661/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 23 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Software engineering coding agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/software-engineering-coding-agents/)
- Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs / [Self-evolving LLM agents](https://mlsanity.com/synth/self-evolving-llm-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16291/) (2023)
- [SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15793/) (2024)
- [MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08560/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19348/) (2026)
- [ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10144/) (2023)
- [GLM-5: from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15763/) (2026)
- [Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02427/) (2023)
- [Automatic Root Cause Analysis via Large Language Models for Cloud Incidents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15778/) (2023)
- [Externalization in LLM Agents: A Unified Review of Memory, Skills, Protocols and Harness Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08224/) (2026)
- [RCAgent: Cloud Root Cause Analysis by Autonomous Agents with Tool-Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16340/) (2023)
- [Exploring LLM-based Agents for Root Cause Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04123/) (2024)
- [Recommending Root-Cause and Mitigation Steps for Cloud Incidents using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03797/) (2023)
- [Flow-of-Action: SOP Enhanced LLM-Based Multi-Agent System for Root Cause Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08224/) (2025)
- [RCAEval: A Benchmark for Root Cause Analysis of Microservice Systems with Telemetry Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17015/) (2024)
- [Automated Root Causing of Cloud Incidents using In-Context Learning with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13810/) (2024)
- [mABC: multi-Agent Blockchain-Inspired Collaboration for root cause analysis in micro-services architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12135/) (2024)
- [Xpert: Empowering Incident Management with Query Recommendations via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11988/) (2023)
- [BARO: Robust Root Cause Analysis for Microservices via Multivariate Bayesian Online Change Point Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09330/) (2024)
- [Eadro: An End-to-End Troubleshooting Framework for Microservices on Multi-source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05092/) (2023)
- [Assess and Summarize: Improve Outage Understanding with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18084/) (2023)
- [AutoTSG: Learning and Synthesis for Incident Troubleshooting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13457/) (2022)
- [Failure Diagnosis in Microservice Systems: A Comprehensive Survey and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01710/) (2024)
- [Mining Root Cause Knowledge from Cloud Service Incident Investigations for AIOps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11598/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated root cause analysis (RCA) with large language models (LLMs) has drawn growing attention. Today, SREs typically automate RCA with LLMs in one of two ways: directly using a general-purpose agent (e.g., Codex or Claude Code) for diagnosis, or building a specialized RCA agent from scratch. As mainstream general agents grow more capable and iterate quickly, our quantitative study finds that the former now often surpasses the latter. Its accuracy, however, still falls short of production needs, and this gap stems mainly from the external adaptation layer outside the agent's general capabilities, namely the harness. We therefore argue that LLM-based RCA should focus on this external harness, reusing the strong general capabilities of a modern agent rather than rebuilding an agent from scratch. A key capability of such a harness is to self-evolve, accumulating system-specific experience from past diagnoses so that it gets better the more it is used. We introduce OpsHarness, a self-evolving RCA harness that turns diagnosis experience into reusable expertise. Its data plane combines layered operational knowledge with an idea-card tool library, while its control plane coordinates setup, diagnosis, evolution, and verification. During evolution, OpsHarness contrasts successful and failed trajectories, converts their evidence into atomic proposals, and admits updates only through a dual-gate verification process designed to prevent overfitting and regression. Across two public benchmarks and an industrial deployment, OpsHarness achieves 59.0% top-1 accuracy, improving over a bare general agent by 63.4% and over baseline RCA agents by 4.02×.