mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Doc2Harness: Benchmarking LLMs on Long-Horizon Harness Engineering of Coding Agents

arXiv 2610.20344 ↗First posted 14 Oct 2026cs.SE cs.AIcited by 0

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Agents driven by large language models are increasingly deployed on long-horizon tasks, where they use tools and modify real workspaces. How well they perform depends as much on the harness around the model as on the model itself. Existing benchmarks measure downstream task success under a fixed harness, leaving harness engineering itself unexplored. We propose Doc2Harness, a two-stage benchmark that evaluates long-horizon harness engineering directly. In Stage 1, a build model operating inside a fixed builder harness receives an interface-only contract skeleton and a development document that consolidates behavior across twelve frontier harnesses, and then constructs a complete candidate harness in an isolated container. In Stage 2, the frozen candidate harness runs in containers separate from the construction environment, one per test case, and is driven end to end by a scripted mock model. We score each test case using four observable channels, namely the requests sent to the model, the files on disk, the process exit code, and the command output; positive controls rule out vacuous passes. Across nineteen frontier models, each evaluated with three independent builds on 328 test cases, GPT-6 Astra achieves the highest pass rate at 53.05%, while the weakest model reaches 27.44%, a gap of roughly twenty-six percentage points. Even the strongest model fails nearly half of the test cases, and failures cluster around how cross-cutting functionality is split across modules. To our knowledge, Doc2Harness provides the first deterministic benchmark for measuring long-horizon harness engineering.

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 35 of its 52 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2026.

Builds on

35 of 52 references.

Closest ancestors · 18

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026EvoHarnessBench: Can Your Agents Keep Pace with an Evolving Harness?3 Sep
  2. 2026CordisBench: Can Language Models Reason About Component Lifecycles in Dynamic Agent Harnesses?1 Sep
  3. 2026HarnessDev: Can LLMs Create and Evolve Their Own Agent Harness?1 Sep
  4. 2026Harness-IF: Evaluating Instruction Following Across Instruction Surfaces in Coding Agents12 Aug
  5. 2026Evo-Bench: Can Language Models Improve Agent Harness?10 Aug
  6. 2026HarnessOpt-Bench: Evaluating LLMs at Harness Optimization6 Aug
  7. 2026Permission Denied: Policy-Graded Evaluation of Coding Agents in Hardened Environments2 Aug
  8. 2026Harness Engineering: Anatomy, Architecture, and Evolution of Coding Agents -- A Source-Code Study of Eleven Systems15 Jul
  9. 2026Rethinking the Evaluation of Harness Evolution for Agents14 Jul
  10. 2026DeepSWE: Measuring Frontier Coding Agents on Original, Long-Horizon Engineering Tasks8 Jul
  11. 2026What makes a harness a harness: necessary and sufficient conditions for an agent harness8 Jun
  12. 2026Harness-Bench: Measuring Harness Effects across Models in Realistic Agent Workflows27 May
6 more
  1. 2026RepoZero: Can LLMs Generate a Code Repository from Scratch?8 May
  2. 2025NL2Repo-Bench: Towards Long-Horizon Repository Generation Evaluation of Coding Agents14 Dec
  3. 2025A Survey of Vibe Coding with Large Language Models14 Oct
  4. 2025Doc2Feat-Bench: Evaluating Documentation-Driven Feature Addition24 Jul
  5. 2024OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents23 Jul
  6. 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering6 May

Other references · 17

  1. 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,320
  2. 2021Program Synthesis with Large Language Modelscited by 3,637
  3. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,373
  4. 2023Is Your Code Generated by ChatGPT Really Correct? Rigorous Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code Generationcited by 1,391
  5. 2026DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligencecited by 1,040
  6. 2025SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?cited by 279
  7. 2026Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligencecited by 138
  8. 2025A Survey of Context Engineering for Large Language Modelscited by 126
  9. 2025SWE-Lancer: Can Frontier LLMs Earn 1 Million from Real-World Freelance Software Engineering?cited by 105
  10. 2026ProgramBench: Can Language Models Rebuild Programs From Scratch?cited by 59
  11. 2024Commit0: Library Generation from Scratchcited by 52
  12. 2026From Question Answering to Task Completion: A Survey on Agent System and Harness Designcited by 12
5 more
  1. 2026Auditing Agent Harness Safetycited by 11
  2. 2026Skill-Use: Can LLMs Actually Use Skills in Agentic Harnesses?cited by 10
  3. 2026Claw-SWE-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating OpenClaw-style Agent Harnesses on Coding Taskscited by 8
  4. 2026HarnessSafe: Evaluating Safety Across Persistent Carriers in Agent Harnessescited by 3
  5. 2026HarnessRisk: A Lifecycle-Oriented Benchmark for Agent Harness Safetycited by 2

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  6. 2025LoCoBench-Agent: An Interactive Benchmark for LLM Agents in Long-Context Software Engineering
  7. 2026The Empire, Long Divided, Must Unite: Architectural Convergence in Three LLM Agent Harnesses
  8. 2026Agentic Harness Engineering: Observability-Driven Automatic Evolution of Coding-Agent Harnesses