Measuring the Microtask Eligibility Gap: When Is an Off-the-Shelf SLM Enough for an Agent Harness?

arXiv cs.AIOctober 2, 2026en

arXiv:2610.00025v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent harnesses increasingly want to run small language models (SLMs) on the microtasks around a frontier large language model (LLM) planner: auto-approving shell commands, writing memory, selecting tools, ranking past turns. We ask whether off-the-shelf SLMs meet practitioner-defined thresholds and, when they fail, why, and whether quantization changes the answer. We build a benchmark of 4 such microtasks with fixed prompts and automatic metrics, each with a pre-specified threshold $\tau$ anchored to a cheap non-LLM baseline and a CI-aware eligibility rule (a configuration passes only if its confidence bound clears $\tau$). Sweeping Qwen3 0.6/

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