// Model or Harness //
Great paper if you are building with agents in production.
(bookmark it)
It organizes 41 agent failure modes by the interaction they originate in. Each mode gets assigned to an edge between two components (model, harness, user, tools, memory, environment) plus a fault side naming where the repair belongs.
Attributing failures to edges rather than to single components matches how agent bugs actually present. Most of them live in the seam between a model and its scaffolding.
The schema also holds up under automation. Across four frontier models, the strongest judge reaches Cohen's kappa of 0.76 against human category labels, so the labeling can run continuously over production traces instead of one postmortem at a time.
Harness engineering became the main lever for agent builders this year without a shared vocabulary for where a harness bug ends and a model bug begins.
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28802
Track more trending AI papers in our academy: https://academy.dair.ai/