Optimize the Harness, Not the Model: Fitting a Minimal Agent to a Self-Hostable LLM for Investigative Analysis

Abstract

Government intelligence teams need LLM agents that can analyze large, messy evidence collections, but security and cost constraints often rule out hosted frontier models and broad, hard-to-audit tool surfaces. We report CLEO: Constrained Loop for Environment Optimization, a method for fitting a minimal agent harness to a fixed, self-hostable LLM. Given an expert-validated dataset, CLEO admits only the tools, guardrails, memory policies, and loop components that improve accuracy while remaining general and auditable. On our held-out dataset, the CLEO harness reaches an 83.8% pass rate, within 1.2 points of the strongest out-of-the-box Claude Code SDK baseline, while being two orders of magnitude smaller.