arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language · · 3 min read

JIT-Agent: Scaling Harness Intelligence via Just-in-Time Harness Evolution

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

arXiv:2608.25593 (cs)
[Submitted on 26 Aug 2026]

Title:JIT-Agent: Scaling Harness Intelligence via Just-in-Time Harness Evolution

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Abstract:Agent capability is not determined by the model alone. The agent harness, encompassing memory management, planning strategy, action protocol, and tool/skill orchestration, can dominate the contribution of the underlying foundation model. Yet harness design remains manual, task-specific, and fundamentally unscalable. We present JIT-Agent, a harness intelligence model trained to synthesize task-adaptive agent harnesses on the fly for arbitrary off-the-shelf agentic LLMs. We formalize the agent harness as a composable, machine-generatable artifact governed by a fixed four-module protocol, and train JIT-Agent to customize harnesses for a given task at hand, repair harnesses for stable and reliable execution, and self-evolve by distilling performance signals from an expanding archive of prior harness configurations. Equipped with JIT-Agent as a harness helper, DeepSeek-V4-Flash surpasses GPT-5.6 on DeepSearchQA (+9.1) and OdysseyBench (+4.3), while the already strong GLM-5.2 gains up to +20.2 points. Across controlled evaluations, JIT-Agent-generated harnesses are performance-competitive with mature agent runtimes such as OpenCode and Claude Code and consistently improve multi-scale model families of DeepSeek V4, Mimo-V2.5, and Qwen3.6. To our knowledge, JIT-Agent is the first model purpose-built for just-in-time harness generation, establishing harness intelligence as a trainable, transferable, and compounding dimension of agent capability orthogonal to model scaling.
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.25593 [cs.CL]
  (or arXiv:2608.25593v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.25593
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Guibin Zhang [view email]
[v1] Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:05:33 UTC (10,418 KB)
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