When Routine Operations Break Architectural Pattern Relationships in LLM Agent Harnesses

Boming Xia, Qinghua Lu, Dino Sejdinovic, Liming Zhu

LLM agent harnesses distribute tool mediation, state management and safety guardrails across native services, independently written plugins and configuration. Routine operations can change the runtime order or retained state that architectural pattern relationships require, without any code change. We study five relationships associated with the Guardrail Enforcement Point, Autonomy Controller and Blackboard patterns across five released harnesses, analysing a main sample of fourteen independently written plugins. Using PatternOps, our assessment procedure, we trace requirements from pattern descriptions, provider documentation and deployment profiles to the providers that realise them and the records that decide them. We then compare alternative allocations under supported operations. Such operations broke relationships silently: after a plugin was reapplied or an allow rule saved, policy stopped evaluating edits while every plugin stayed active, and a prohibited edit executed. Which alternatives qualified depended on the requirement. Allocations that kept the required order, or kept or rebuilt the needed state, held on their tested paths and operation sequences, while others…