arxivcs.CLcs.AI2026-07-20
Automated Discovery Has No Universally Superior Harness
Akshat Gupta, Jermaine Lei, Alexander Lu, Gopala Anumanchipalli, Leshem Choshen
Autonomous discovery systems such as OpenEvolve and TTT-Discover are often used as general-purpose harnesses. However, in practice these are composite systems combining several design choices about archives, parent selection, exploration, and budget allocation into a single recip…