Stacklok
Trust and infrastructure for open-source ecosystems — now Mecatl.
Stacklok, founded by Kubernetes/Sigstore creator Craig McLuckie, builds trust tooling for open source. In 2026 it shipped Mecatl — an open-source, cloud-native agent harness that architecturally separates the agent loop from code execution, built to run identically on a laptop or Kubernetes.
Open-source project
In the news
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.
HarnessTax: harness choice swings agent cost more than model choice
Arena.ai's HarnessTax study tests 21 model–harness combinations across Claude Code, Codex CLI and Pi, finding harness choice can significantly change cost even at similar task success rates. Weeks earlier, SWE-bench Pro analysis showed swapping harnesses moved pass@1 more than model upgrades (23%→52% on GLM-5.2) — and that harness rankings barely transfer across models.
xAI open-sources Grok Build, its coding agent harness
xAI open-sources Grok Build — a Rust coding agent harness and fullscreen TUI around Grok models — unusually early for a first-party tool. It joins Claude Code, Codex and Gemini CLI as the fourth major first-party harness, now with a fourth open one.
Anthropic launches the Claude Agent SDK
Anthropic open-sources the SDK behind Claude Code — the agent loop, tool use, subagents, memory and hooks — letting developers build their own Claude-powered agents on production rails.
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