Mingbird: A Local-First Agent Harness Enabling Small Open Models to Complete Real Tasks

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.02001v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Small open-weight models (2-9B) run on ordinary laptops, but under cloud-scale agent harnesses they rarely complete real tasks: tool prefill overflows the context, self-correction diverges, tool demonstrations loop, and tasks are silently abandoned. We present evidence, from a controlled single-machine comparison and one third-party benchmark, that a substantial share of these failures is attributable to the harness rather than the model. We introd