A curated, verified, cross-vendor directory of AI agent harnesses — the runtime scaffolding that turns a model into an agent.
◆ 74 harnesses profiled · 9-axis capability schema · last verified 2026-07-08
Anthropic's Claude-only agent harness in native desktop form, redesigned April 14, 2026 around a multi-session sidebar for parallel agents across repos, with integrated terminal/editor/diff viewer, cloud-hosted 'Routines' that run on Anthropic infrastructure while your machine is off, and the ecosystem that originated Agent Skills, subagents, hooks, plugins, and the headless Agent SDK (repo is issue tracker/docs; stars 136,750).
High-performance Rust editor (GPL, hit 1.0 in 2026) whose Agent Panel offers a native agent with profiles/tool-permissions and MCP, but whose real differentiator is the open Agent Client Protocol (ACP) that lets external agents (Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, OpenCode — which bring their own skills support) render diffs natively in-editor, plus first-in-class native Parallel Agents (April 2026).
AWS's Claude-powered agentic IDE (VS Code fork; launched internationally May 7, 2026 as the successor to Amazon Q Developer) whose signature is spec-driven development — generating requirements.md/design.md/tasks.md with EARS acceptance criteria before coding — plus event-driven agent hooks, steering files, AGENTS.md/Skills.md/MCP support, and 'Kiro Powers' pre-packaged AWS MCP servers; the GitHub repo (3,980 stars) is a public issue tracker, not the source.
VS Code-fork AI IDE whose Agent mode plus in-house Composer models, Background/Cloud Agents (isolated cloud VMs that report back as PRs), hooks, skills, and an agent SDK make it the most fully-built-out commercial agentic IDE; Composer 2 scored 61.7% on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and Composer 2.5 79.8% on SWE-bench Multilingual (SWE-bench Verified not reported).
ByteDance's VS Code-based AI IDE, notable for aggressive pricing (free tier plus $3-$100/mo token-based tiers, restructured Feb 2026) and the SOLO mode (standalone app since March 31, 2026) that acts as an end-to-end 'context engineer' handling requirements, code, terminal, browser testing and deployment, with MCP (stdio/SSE/streamable HTTP) and custom agents — but persistent privacy/telemetry concerns.
Google's agent-first development platform (launched Nov 2025, Antigravity 2.0 at I/O 2026 moved it toward a production standalone desktop app), distinguished by its Agent Manager 'mission control' that orchestrates parallel agents across editor, terminal, and an embedded browser subagent, with agents producing reviewable Artifacts (plans, screenshots, browser recordings) and a persistent knowledge/learnings base; runs Gemini 3 alongside Claude and GPT-OSS models.