Survey formalizes the 'harness' as six coupled runtime responsibilities distinct from the model

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A new arXiv survey, 'From Question Answering to Task Completion: A Survey on Agent System and Harness Design' (2606.20683, June 14), decomposes the agent execution harness into six coupled runtime responsibilities — observation, context, control, action, state and verification — and argues performance emerges from the interaction of model capability, runtime infrastructure, task structure and evaluation, not the model alone. It maps task properties to specific harness configurations. For builders, it's a useful vocabulary for why swapping in a better model rarely fixes a flaky agent — the harness is often the bottleneck.