In plain words: A wrapper that lets a game agent, in one run with no restarts, rewrite its own instructions, helpers, skills, and memory. On two Pokémon games it needed fewer button presses than a bare setup and closed most of the gap to a hand-built expert one.
Abstract
Coding harnesses such as Claude Code and OpenHands wrap foundation models with tools, memory, and planning, but no equivalent exists for embodied agents' long-horizon partial-observability decision-making. We first report our Gemini Plays Pokemon (GPP) experiments. With iterative human-in-the-loop harness refinement, GPP became the first AI system to complete Pokemon Blue, Yellow Legacy on hard mode, and Crystal without a lost battle. In the hardest stages, the agent itself began iterating on its strategy through long-context memory, surfacing emergent self-improvement signals alongside human-in-the-loop refinement. Continual Harness removes the human fully from this loop: a reset-free self-improving harness for embodied agents that formalizes and automates what we observed. Starting from only a minimal environment interface, the agent alternates between acting and refining its own prompt, sub-agents, skills, and memory, drawing on any past trajectory data. Prompt-optimization methods require episode resets; Continual Harness adapts online within a single run. On Pokemon Red and Emerald across frontier models, Continual Harness starting from scratch substantially reduces button-press cost relative to the minimalist baseline and recovers a majority of the gap to a hand-engineered expert harness, with capability-dependent gains, despite starting from the same raw interface with no curated knowledge, no hand-crafted tools, and no domain scaffolding. We then close the loop with the model itself: an online process-reward co-learning loop, in which an open-source agent's rollouts through the refining harness are relabeled by a frontier teacher and used to update the model, drives sustained in-game milestone progress on Pokemon Red without resetting the environment between training iterations.
Seth Karten, Joel Zhang, Tersoo Upaa, Ruirong Feng, Wenzhe Li, Chengshuai Shi, Chi Jin, Kiran Vodrahalli
arXiv:2605.09998 · cs.LG, cs.AI · submitted May 11, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · 28 pages, 19 figures, 5 tables
Long-horizon embodied agency is a harness problem, not a model-scale problem. Coding agents like Claude Code work because of scaffolding (prompt, skills, memory, sub-agents) around the model. Embodied agents haven't had an equivalent.
Gemini Plays Pokémon (GPP) became the first AI to complete Pokémon Blue, Yellow Legacy on hard mode, and Crystal without a lost battle via iterative harness refinement. Early on a human edited the harness. By Crystal the model was doing it itself by naming its own strategies, writing truth tables for puzzles, wrapping loopholes into reusable primitives.
Continual Harness automates this fully. Starting from a raw interface with no curated knowledge, every F steps a Refiner reads the recent trajectory and applies edits to the prompt, sub-agents, skills, and memory -- no resets. It closes most of the gap to a hand-engineered expert harness from scratch.
Our key findings: (1) Iterative harness refinement closes most of the gap to a hand-engineered version. (2) Long-horizon agency requires self-refinement, and self-refinement requires a useful model. (3) The future of agents is model-harness co-learning.
Demos: https://sethkarten.ai/continual-harness