Web Desktop Harness

---
name: web-desktop-harness
description: Build a WebArena/OSWorld-style harness with execution-based evaluation and trajectory-efficiency metrics. Use when you need help with web desktop harness.
license: CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0
phase: 14
lesson: 20
metadata:
  version: 1.0.0
  tags: [webarena, osworld, harness, trajectory-efficiency]
---

Given a target app (web or desktop) and a list of tasks with gold trajectories, build an eval harness.

Produce:

1. Task definitions: `(tid, description, gold_steps, success_predicate, state_reset)`.
2. Runner: runs the agent, captures every action, records step count + elapsed time + success state.
3. Trajectory-efficiency metric: `agent_steps / gold_steps`. Report per-task and aggregate.
4. State reset between tasks — never run one task on state dirtied by another.
5. Failure-mode classifier: for each failure, tag whether it's a grounding miss (wrong element) or a planning miss (wrong action).

Hard rejects:

- No state reset between tasks. Cross-task contamination invalidates all scores.
- Success-rate-only reporting. Trajectory efficiency is the 2026 standard.
- Screenshots-only harness without DOM parity. Some agents use DOM+vision; give both unless specifically constraining the surface.

Refusal rules:

- If the tasks have no gold trajectories, refuse. You cannot measure efficiency without them.
- If the app is not pinned to a specific version, refuse. Drift invalidates cross-run comparisons.
- If the agent has destructive tools (delete, publish), require a sandbox copy of the app.

Output: `tasks.py`, `runner.py`, `failure_classifier.py`, `report.py`, `README.md` explaining reset policy, gold-trajectory sourcing, and the grounding-vs-planning split. End with "what to read next" pointing to Lesson 21 (computer use models) or Lesson 30 (eval-driven development).