The Empire, Long Divided, Must Unite: Architectural Convergence in Three LLM Agent Harnesses

arXiv:2608.23953 · cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CE · Submitted 2026-08-25 · Read on arXiv

cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CE

Submitted: 2026-08-25

Updated: 2026-08-25

Code: https://github.com/langchain-ai/deepagents

Terminology

• Verifiability — 18× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Agent Harness — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Progressive Disclosure — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Scaffolding — 6× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Provenance — 4× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• AI Agents — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Core — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Grounding — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Adam — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Agent Architectures — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Calibration — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Human-in-the-Loop — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Multi-Agent Framework — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Self-Evolving Agents — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• State Management — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Trace — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Verification — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering
• Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agents
• AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation
• Stop Comparing LLM Agents Without Disclosing the Harness
• Inside the Scaffold: A Source-Code Taxonomy of Coding Agent Architectures
• Don't Blame the Large Language Model: How Agent Harness Evolution Shapes Coding Agent Quality
• Autogenesis: A Self-Evolving Agent Protocol
• The Devil Is in the Interface: Evaluating How Tool Architecture Shapes Coding Agent Behavior
• Confucius Code Agent: Scalable Agent Scaffolding for Real-World Codebases
• A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents: What, When, How, and Where to Evolve on the Path to Artificial Super Intelligence

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