Can LLMs Engineer Their Own Agent Harness? ByteDance Seed’s HarnessDev Says Only 34 of 64 Changes Generalize

ByteDance Seed, SUTD, Georgia Tech, M-A-P, and TokenWave.AI introduce HarnessDev, a benchmark that scores the runnable harness a model builds rather than the answer it returns. Starting from a seed that scores 0, 6 creator LLMs construct harnesses across 5 benchmarks and 2,207 tasks, then evolve them from execution feedback. Self-built harnesses match human references on writing and ML…