Paper: Minimal-harness coding agents match complex harnesses for autonomous ML engineering
The authors evaluate autonomous machine-learning-engineering (MLE) agents and report that, given the same time budget and the same frontier LLM backbone, open-source state-of-the-art multi-agent harnesses offer no advantage over a single-session minimal-harness coding agent baseline. Large-scale ablation studies indicate the extra orchestration layers are redundant in the coding-agent setting, implying the backbone model is the primary driver of current leaderboard performance.