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arxiv:2611.03178

CoworkOS:Scaling Agent Coworkers for Real-world Automation

Published on Nov 2
· Submitted by
KABI
on Nov 3
#3 Paper of the day
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Abstract

CoworkOS is a long-horizon agent harness that separates strategy from execution, supports human-in-the-loop collaboration via shared artifacts, and improves model performance through sustained automated post-training.

Rapid advances in cowork agents are shifting human-AI collaboration toward real-world automation, delivering software, designs, and other artifacts. However, such productivity work demands both high-quality delivery on complex productivity tasks and continued monitoring and decision-making over long horizons, a combination that remains an open challenge. We introduce CoworkOS, a general-purpose harness for long-horizon work that separates task strategy from execution management: the model decides actions, delegation, and acceptance, while the runtime maintains state and feedback. Its three-layer architecture enables direct execution or delegation to Subagents, synchronously or asynchronously, under stable responsibilities. Through a shared application layer, humans and agents inspect and revise the same evolving documents, presentations, CAD models, and Blender scenes, so human-in-the-loop participation can enter both through conversation and through direct modification of the work itself. To sustain continuity across agents and sessions, CoworkOS further introduces hierarchical workspaces and persistent semantic memory, so working files, key decisions, and long-running Job logs remain shareable, reusable, and resumable after interruption. Across 12 benchmarks and 6 categories of real-world applications, CoworkOS proves highly competitive with frontier agent applications such as Codex and DeepSeek Harness. As a sustained-work case study, CoworkOS uses GLM-5.3 as its backbone to conduct RSI-driven automated post-training on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B. Over five rounds, the model's average score across eight benchmarks rose from 33.19 to 42.95 (+9.76). Looking ahead, we believe CoworkOS opens a meaningful path toward general cowork-agent intelligence.

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Excited to share our latest work 🥳:

🌍 CoworkOS: Scaling Agent Coworkers for Real-world Automation

Building a true “super AI coworker” that handles both complex productivity and long-horizon decision-making.

💡 Three pillars of Design:
1️⃣ Three-layer cowork: Main plans & accepts · Coordinator schedules · Subagents execute (sync/async)
2️⃣ Shared apps: humans & agents co-edit the same docs / CAD / Blender — chat or direct edits
3️⃣ Persistent runtime: hierarchical workspaces + semantic memory + background Jobs → resumable, monitorable

📊 Results:
✅ Competitive with Codex & DeepSeek Harness across 12 productivity benchmarks + 24 real deliverables
✅ RSI-native: 5 rounds of automated post-training lift Qwen3.6-35B-A3B from 33.19 → 42.95 (+9.76) on 8 benchmarks

📄 Paper:
http://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/CoworkOS/blob/main/CoworkOS_paper.pdf
🌐 Site: https://coworkos-ai.github.io
💻 Code: https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/CoworkOS
🎬 Demo: https://coworkos-ai.github.io/showcase.html

The detail I liked most is the experiment ledger that separates metrics read from run-produced files from values that only appear in narrative reports; in multi-agent setups, a subagent's summary claiming a result is exactly where things tend to drift. In the five-round post-training study (33.19 to 42.95 on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B), how often did that distinction actually change GLM-5.3's next decision as controller? Also curious what happened in R1 and R2, since the gains are described as consecutive from R3 onward, and how much generated data the BM25 similarity filter ended up removing.

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