Research | Medley

The Harness Is the Capability Multiplier

Medley turns ambitious work into a contract-driven execution graph, then makes the harness self-improving through an unsupervised, grade-blind trace loop.

Medley turns ambitious work into a contract-driven execution graph, then makes the harness self-improving through an unsupervised, grade-blind trace loop. The resulting systems set new reported highs across terminal work, clinician conversations, full-stack applications, and drug discovery, while the learned procedures transfer across closed and open-weight models without changing model weights.

July 27, 202622 min read

Research

AI Coding Agent ROI: How to Measure Developer Productivity Gains

Stop guessing whether AI agents are saving you time. Here is the exact framework to calculate net value per mission.

A concrete framework for calculating the real ROI of AI coding agents — moving beyond token counts to actual developer hours saved per task.

July 8, 202610 min read

Research

Cost Per Task, Not Per Token: How to Actually Budget for AI Coding Agents

Token meters tell you what you spent. They don't tell you what it was worth.

Token-based billing makes AI coding agents impossible to budget for — you can't tell which task drove the cost, whether it was worth it, or where to cut. This article makes the case for cost-per-task accounting and explains what it takes to actually see, attribute, and control what your agents spend.

June 25, 20267 min read

Research

Why Smaller Models Win

The Case for Multi-Model Ensembling in AI Agent Workflows

The default assumption — bigger model, better results — breaks down for complex, multi-step missions. This article makes the case for multi-model ensembling: decomposing work and routing each sub-task to the right-sized model consistently outperforms monolithic frontier execution on cost, latency, error isolation, and often quality.

June 15, 20269 min read

The research shelf

The Harness Is the Capability Multiplier

AI Coding Agent ROI: How to Measure Developer Productivity Gains

Cost Per Task, Not Per Token: How to Actually Budget for AI Coding Agents

Why Smaller Models Win