Pith Number

pith:MNJXN7JJ

pith:2026:MNJXN7JJX4YURQGCTQYW5CJ3XC

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Harness Engineering for Agentic AI Coding Tools: An Exploratory Study

Christoph Treude, Jai Lal Lulla, Matthias Galster, Muhammad Auwal Abubakar, Sebastian Baltes, Seyedmoein Mohsenimofidi

Context files dominate how developers configure agentic AI coding tools, with AGENTS.md emerging as an interoperable standard.

arxiv:2602.14690 v5 · 2026-02-16 · cs.SE

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\pithnumber{MNJXN7JJX4YURQGCTQYW5CJ3XC}

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4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

Context Files dominate the configuration landscape and are often the sole mechanism in a repository, with AGENTS.md emerging as an interoperable standard across tools.

C2weakest assumption

The 2,853 GitHub repositories identified and analyzed are representative of broader developer practices and that the eight configuration mechanisms identified comprehensively capture how these tools are actually configured.

C3one line summary

Developers overwhelmingly rely on simple static context files such as AGENTS.md to configure agentic AI coding tools, while advanced mechanisms like skills and subagents see very low adoption.

Cited by

7 papers in Pith

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Agentic Agile-V: From Vibe Coding to Verified Engineering in Software and Hardware Development

Inside the Scaffold: A Source-Code Taxonomy of Coding Agent Architectures

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-07-02T00:18:27.225537Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

635376fd29bf3148c0c29c316e893bb88b7a55d5cee75c798384704895b0fab8

Aliases

arxiv: 2602.14690 · arxiv_version: 2602.14690v5 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2602.14690 · pith_short_12: MNJXN7JJX4YU · pith_short_16: MNJXN7JJX4YURQGC · pith_short_8: MNJXN7JJ

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/MNJXN7JJX4YURQGCTQYW5CJ3XC \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 635376fd29bf3148c0c29c316e893bb88b7a55d5cee75c798384704895b0fab8

Canonical record JSON

{
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    "abstract_canon_sha256": "d2871937985ba3628e523a16ba042b8f1984e6544916d99aa81a389b30ab55c2",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.SE",
    "submitted_at": "2026-02-16T12:24:28Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "596f4ca1bb0f4e3bf5f9dab7552bbac99ced81ecb4f724f93d7d43ca69579748"
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    "kind": "arxiv",
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}