A running topic on the Engineering Blog is how to build effective agents and design harnesses for long-running work. A common thread across this work is that harnesses encode assumptions about what Claude can’t do on its own. However, those assumptions need to be frequently questioned because they can go stale as models improve.
As just one example, in prior work we found that link not tracked would wrap up tasks prematurely as it sensed its context limit approaching—a behavior sometimes called context anxiety We addressed this by adding context resets to the harness. But when we used the same harness on Claude Opus 4.5, we found that the behavior was gone. The resets had become dead weight.
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the bitter lesson suggests you should try to reduce inductive bias as much as possible