If you hand-tune agent harnesses, this one is worth your time.

AutoDesign puts the harness itself inside the optimization loop. A meta-harness optimizer reads rollout feedback and directs a code agent to rewrite the harness, round after round.

They test it on paper-to-poster generation with PosterBench, 100 papers across five disciplines. AutoDesign scores 78.32 against 70.87 for the closed-source Claude Design.

Dropping the learned DesignHarness into seven other code-agent-model configurations lifts the average from 54.99 to 67.39, so what it learned is scaffold knowledge rather than a fit to one model.

One full autonomous run executes 253 tool calls and 11 editing turns in 40 minutes for under $3.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13560

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