Agent Harness Awareness: Turning Verified Telemetry into Operational Control for Tool-Using Agents

arXiv:2611.05391v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool descriptions tell an agent what an action can do, but they do not necessarily reveal whether that action is healthy or suitable at the moment of use. Execution harnesses often possess this information through monitors, traces, and recent failures while the model choosing the next action does not. We call this gap operational blindness. We introduce Agent Harness Awareness, a trust-separated design in which the host supplies a small, fresh, verified state snapshot before a consequential action while retaining measurement, enforcement, evaluation, and final dispatch authority.