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This paper introduces a two-level framework for automating the engineering of harnesses (prompts, tools, orchestration logic, and evaluation criteria) for AI agents deployed on complex, domain-specific workflows. The framework consists of a Harness Evolution Loop that optimizes a worker agent's harness for a single task, and a Meta-Evolution Loop that optimizes the evolution blueprint across diverse tasks. The key result is a learned blueprint that enables rapid harness convergence on any new task without human intervention, effectively automating the design of harness automation.
Forget hand-crafting prompts: this framework learns how to *automatically* engineer the perfect task-specific harness for your AI agent, across diverse domains.
AI agents are increasingly deployed on complex, domain-specific workflows -- navigating enterprise web applications that require dozens of clicks and form fills, orchestrating multi-step research pipelines that span search, extraction, and synthesis, automating code review across unfamiliar repositories, and handling customer escalations that demand nuanced domain knowledge. \textbf{Each new task domain requires painstaking, expert-driven harness engineering}: designing the prompts, tools, orchestration logic, and evaluation criteria that make a foundation model effective. We present a two-level framework that automates this process. At the first level, the \textbf{Harness Evolution Loop} optimizes a worker agent's harness $\mathcal{H}$ for a single task: a Worker Agent $W_{\mathcal{H}}$ executes the task, an Evaluator Agent $V$ adversarially diagnoses failures and scores performance, and an Evolution Agent $E$ modifies the harness based on the full history of prior attempts. At the second level, the \textbf{Meta-Evolution Loop} optimizes the evolution blueprint $\Lambda = (W_{\mathcal{H}}, \mathcal{H}^{(0)}, V, E)$ itself across diverse tasks, \textbf{learning a blueprint $\Lambda^{(\text{best})}$ that enables rapid harness convergence on any new task -- so that adapting an agent to a novel domain requires no human harness engineering at all.} We formalize the correspondence to meta-learning and present both algorithms. The framework \textbf{shifts manual harness engineering into automated harness engineering}, and takes one step further -- \textbf{automating the design of the automation itself}.