# Mingbird: A Local-First Agent Harness Enabling Small Open Models to Complete Real Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02001 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02001/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

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## Abstract (arXiv)

Small open-weight models (2-9B) run on ordinary laptops, but under cloud-scale agent harnesses they rarely complete real tasks: tool prefill overflows the context, self-correction diverges, tool demonstrations loop, and tasks are silently abandoned. We present evidence, from a controlled single-machine comparison and one third-party benchmark, that a substantial share of these failures is attributable to the harness rather than the model. We introduce Mingbird, a local-first agent harness for Windows and Ollama whose ten mechanisms compensate point-by-point for small-model failure forms, three of them representative: a byte-level net-zero prefill budget, a finish gate that re-reads the task before accepting completion, and signature-level loop detection. On LRAB, a controlled comparison holding machine, models, budgets, and scoring fixed (4 harnesses × 4 open models (2B-35B) × 18 real tasks, deterministic artifact scoring), Mingbird reaches 0.886 overall against 0.631 (goose), 0.479 (opencode), and 0.405 (agent-mini), with all 288 cells published; on τ2-bench (278 tasks, three arms, one protocol) it totals 0.856 against 0.791 and 0.737; and a frontier-model probe on the same 18 tasks spans 0.997 to 0.478 across harnesses, with well-formed scaffolds staying within 0.072 of each other. A leave-one-mechanism-out ablation is reported as directional only: same-night replications of the same arm move its mean by up to 0.069, the size of every nominal single-trial delta, and the one batch-matched comparison (full mechanism stack versus text re-read alone) gives the executable completion guards a paired +0.10 across three replications. The evidence carries stated limits: a self-built benchmark, a single machine, and single-trial scoring.