Over the past two months, a cluster of papers has appeared on arXiv from teams at Alibaba's DreamX group, Meta AI, Google Cloud, ByteDance Seed, and others — all aimed at the same target: the agent harness , the runtime layer wrapped around the model that handles context construction, state management, tool invocation, error recovery, and result verification. The term is so new it didn't have an agreed definition until recently. A researcher at Brazil's Federal Institute of Goiás published a...