This paper shows that agent performance depends less on prompts alone and more on the harness around them.
Rohan Paul Twitter · Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) · 2026-05-23
A research paper highlighted by Rohan Paul argues that AI agent performance is determined more by the surrounding infrastructure harness than by prompt design alone, reframing agent intelligence as a systems engineering challenge.
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Extraction
Topics: agent-architectureagentic-aiai-systemsprompt-engineering
Claims
- Agent performance depends more on the code harness surrounding the model than on the prompts given to it.
- Many AI agents appear to be a single model but their real behavior emerges from the surrounding infrastructure code.
- Agent intelligence should be understood as a systems problem, not purely a model capability problem.
Key quotes
Agent intelligence is becoming partly a systems problem.
Many AI agents look like 1 model, but their real behavior comes from surrounding code that [content truncated]