The Meta-Agent Challenge: Are Current Agents Capable of Autonomous Agent Development?

Takeaway

• A code agent gets a sandbox, a hidden test split, and 12–24 hours to write the agent that solves the task; across five domains, meta-agents rarely beat human-engineered scaffolds and the design process is brittle.

Remaining work

• Grading is rule-based. Under an LLM judge, how fast does the meta-agent optimize the judge instead of the answer?
• The executor is weak (Qwen3-8B). What changes with a strong one — or when designer and executor are the same model?
• This and Meta-Harness are both single-domain RSI. What does cross-domain RSI look like?