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

**Published:** October 2, 2026
**Author:** Jundong Hu, Shekar Ramachandran
**Source:** arXiv — cs.AI
**Language:** en-US
**HTML:** https://aiqazaqstan.com/en/articles/measuring-the-microtask-eligibility-gap-when-is-an-off-the-shelf-slm-eno

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…

> From the original source: **arXiv — cs.AI**
> [Read full article at arXiv — cs.AI](https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00025)

**Tags:** #arXiv

---

*AI Qazaqstan — non-commercial informational portal about AI in Kazakhstan. Machine translations and summaries are AI-generated.*