AutoDesign: Meta-Harness Optimization for Long-Horizon Agentic Design

Key points

It adopts the approach of fixing the model parameters and optimizing the harness, so that failure experience accumulates into improvement of the system itself.
It introduces a safe update gate that changes only one component at a time and requires the development-performance condition to pass before promotion.
After adding the learned DesignHarness, all seven code-agent configurations improve by 5.0 to 19.6 points, with the average rising from 54.99 to 67.39.
On PosterBench, which contains 100 papers across 5 fields, it reaches 78.32 points, the best overall score, and beats the commercial Claude Design system by 7.45 points.
In a fully autonomous loop, it makes 253 tool calls and 11 edits in 40 minutes for less than 3 dollars and produces conference-poster-quality results.

External research summaries. These are not HDATF publications or measured product results.