Whitepaper

Long-Horizon Agents, Managed Harnesses, and Context Discipline

Why serious agent systems succeed through harness design, not prompt cleverness alone.

Abstract

The strongest agent systems are rarely those with the cleverest prompts. They are the systems with the best harnesses. Long-horizon performance depends on context discipline, state management, memory strategy, task decomposition, tool quality, and intervention design.

Managed Harness Pattern

This paper distinguishes workflows from agents, emphasizes managed harnesses over free autonomy, and proposes design patterns for durable state, short-lived working memory, progress tracking, stop conditions, human intervention, tool traces, and recovery.