StartupSan Francisco, CA · Est. 2017

Harness

AI-native software delivery platform with purpose-built agents across the SDLC.

Harness brands itself 'The Autonomous SDLC Platform'. It runs purpose-built agents across CI/CD, security, runtime protection and cloud cost, including a Software Delivery Agent, a Zero-day Remediation Agent, a Security Testing Agent, a Runtime Protection Agent and a Cost Management Agent, on top of a Harness AI layer and an SDLC knowledge graph. Controls include policy-as-code, an audit trail, human-in-the-loop approval and risk-based autonomy. It is an agents-for-software-delivery company rather than a general-purpose agent harness; a third-party review describes its AI as an add-on to the CI/CD platform. The shared name with the term 'harness' is a coincidence.

Visit harness.io

In the news

Launch · DeepSeek · Oct 2, 2026

DeepSeek ships Harness Desktop; the 'everything is a plugin' harness passes 240k stars

DeepSeek releases a macOS and Windows Desktop app for DeepSeek Harness, its open-source agent harness where everything — tools, sub-agents, even the loop — is a plugin. The repo passed 240k stars within three months of its August launch, making it the fastest-growing harness in the field's history.

Community · GitHub · Oct 2, 2026

Best of Agent Harnesses tracks 167 harnesses — and their graveyard

The Best of Agent Harnesses list ranks 167 agent harnesses weekly by capability, autonomy and recovery, ships an MCP server so agents can pick their own harness, and maintains a graveyard that flagged a 268k-star repo for suspected star manipulation. Curation itself becomes harness infrastructure.

Open Source · GitHub · Sep 29, 2026

EverMind open-sources Raven — 'the harness of harnesses'

EverMind AI releases Raven, a trusted, persistent, self-evolving multi-agent ecosystem built for recursive self-improvement — agents that modify their own harness under governance. The Show HN thread became a running debate on how much autonomy a harness should hand an agent over itself.

Community · arXiv · Sep 22, 2026

First 'Harness Engineering' survey lands on arXiv

'Harness Engineering: Anatomy, Architecture, and Evolution of Coding Agents' surveys the field — loops, tool interfaces, context management, memory and recovery — giving the emerging discipline its first comprehensive academic map.

In research (1)

What Will Replace Pull Requests? Rethinking Software Collaboration for AI AgentsVerdict: Useful
Oct 26, 2026 · Harness's risk-grouped PR review and GitHub migration are among the responses reviewed.

San Francisco, CA · Est. 2023

Featured

Cognition

Devin, the AI software engineer, and the Windsurf IDE.

Cognition builds Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer that plans and executes engineering tasks end-to-end, and acquired the Windsurf agentic IDE in 2025. One of the defining startups of the coding-agent wave.

~$10.2B valuation (Sep 2025)

3 pros · 4 cons

New York, NY · Est. 2021

Modal

Serverless cloud built for AI and agentic compute.

Modal lets teams run inference, fine-tuning and arbitrary agent workloads as serverless Python without managing infrastructure — a common substrate for harness backends at scale.

4 pros · 4 cons

Seattle, WA · Est. 2019

Temporal

Durable execution for long-running agent workflows.

Temporal's durable execution engine is widely adopted to make agent pipelines reliable: state survives crashes, retries are automatic, and workflows run for minutes or months. A key piece of serious harness infrastructure.

$430M total · $300M Series D (Feb 2026) at $5B valuation