Research Insights Made Simple · episode 45· recording pending
Model or Harness: What Moves the Score?
Harbor Adapters and Harbor-Index
November 3, 2026
The release date has arrived; the recording is still being prepared.
Episode participants
A solo episode without invited guests.
What we will explore
Research Insights Made Simple episode 45 is scheduled for November 3, 2026 at 10:00 Moscow time. Alexander Polomodov reviews Harbor Adapters and Harbor-Index and asks what affects agent performance more: the model or its harness.
The study compares eight models in native and neutral harnesses across 54 benchmarks. We discuss task adapters, model and harness effects, cost, timeouts and the limits of the comparison.
We also examine Harbor-Index, a set of 82 difficult tasks, and how to use this research when selecting a configuration for your own tasks without conflating distinct experimental sets.
AI in SDLCResearch methodology