A 314-page reliability monograph argues coding-agent failures are harness failures, and ships 206 gated practice records to fix them

arXiv 2608.13867·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

Synthesizing 164 scholarly works, 100 practitioner records, 29 benchmark records and 17 case studies, this multivocal review concludes reliability depends on the harness, execution state, retrieval, memory and state management rather than model capability — and that improvements at one layer routinely fail to propagate to end-to-end outcomes. It contributes 206 reliability records (193 gated practices, 56 developed in depth), 13 research leads, 5 reusable agent skills with evidence maps, and runnable evaluation and reliability protocols. It is a reference to mine rather than read, and the central claim is a direct warning against benchmarking a harness change by swapping the model underneath it.