Teaching the Harness: Student-Aware Skill Transfer for LLM Agents

arXiv:2611.13144v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective teaching requires reasoning about the learner as well as the task, a capacity that Theory of Mind describes as inferring another agent's latent state from its behavior. We ask whether a stronger LLM teaches a fixed student better when it applies this principle. The student is an LLM agent acting through a harness that fixes its tools, context, and action budget, so a procedure that helps one model can exhaust the budget of another. We introduce Student-Aware Teaching (SAT). The teacher builds a learner model that pairs an empirical profile with hypotheses about the student's limitations, tests these hypotheses with diagnostic probes, and writes reusable skills for the diagnosed failures.