Object-Oriented Harness: Evolving Agent Harnesses through Object-Oriented Design

Overview & Synopsis

Agent harnesses are executable code that specifies the prompts, tools, and control flow around a language model. A single global harness can struggle with heterogeneous tasks that require different execution strategies. In this work, we introduce Object-Oriented Harness (OO-Harness), a harness optimization framework that evolves a hierarchy of executable harness classes using object-oriented design. During training, an evolution agent uses execution records to create a family of specialized harnesses, each implemented as a subclass of the base or an existing specialized harness via inheritance. At test time, a harness router uses routing lessons accumulated during training to select a specific harness for each task. Across three long-horizon benchmarks spanning business workflows, workspace tasks, and tool use, OO-Harness achieves the best performance among the compared methods, with an absolute improvement of up to 15% over the base. Extensive ablation studies examine the contributions of its core components.