$ find your agent harness

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

10 of 74 harnesses · sorted by stars

Claude Code (desktop app) · Anthropic

136,750 · high

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).

IDE & desktopproprietarysubscription✓ mcp✓ skillsoptional

Claude Code · Anthropic

136,749 · high

Anthropic's terminal-native agentic coding tool and the category-defining harness, distinguished by its layered extensibility model (CLAUDE.md memory, Agent Skills, subagents, hooks, plugins, MCP) plus permission modes, checkpoints, and optional sandboxing, available from CLI/IDE/desktop/web with an Agent SDK for building on top.

Vendor CLI agentsproprietarysubscription✓ mcp✓ skillsoptional

GitHub Copilot CLI · GitHub (Microsoft)

10,921 · high

GitHub's terminal agent (GA February 2026) that brings the Copilot coding agent to the CLI, distinguished by deep GitHub.com integration (built-in GitHub MCP server, in-terminal Issues/PRs/Gists tabs), an Autopilot autonomous mode, custom .agent.md agents, multi-vendor model choice, and AI-credit-based billing.

Vendor CLI agentsproprietarysubscription✓ mcp

Auggie CLI · Augment Code

250 · medium

Augment Code's terminal agent distinguished by its real-time Context Engine (semantic indexing of 1M+ files across repos, dependencies, docs, and git history), Unix-pipe-friendly print/quiet headless modes for CI/Lambda, custom slash commands, and credit-based plans from $20 (Indie) to enterprise.

Vendor CLI agentsproprietarysubscription✓ mcp

Cursor CLI · Anysphere (Cursor)

high

Cursor's terminal/headless version of its IDE agent (shipped January 2026), distinguished by cloud handoff to isolated cloud VMs, sandboxed command execution with granular network/filesystem controls, hooks, async subagents, and shared MCP/rules/skills config with the Cursor editor.

Vendor CLI agentsproprietarysubscription✓ mcp✓ skillsoptional

Droid (Factory) · Factory AI

medium

Factory AI's agent-native development platform whose Droid CLI held top Terminal-Bench rankings (77.3% with GPT-5.3-Codex, Feb 2026), distinguished by deploying agents across CLI, IDEs, Slack, and Linear with broad multi-vendor model support including Chinese open-weight models; raised $150M at $1.5B in April 2026.

Vendor CLI agentsproprietarysubscription✓ mcpoptional

Grok Build · xAI

medium

xAI's terminal coding agent (beta, launched June 5, 2026) distinguished by 8 parallel worktree-isolated subagents, a plan-first approval workflow, Arena Mode for competing outputs, an ACP-to-MCP bridge for MCP servers, OpenCode integration, and aggressive pricing via SuperGrok ($30/mo) and X Premium+ subscriptions.

Vendor CLI agentsproprietarysubscription✓ mcp

OpenAI Codex (cloud) · OpenAI

high

OpenAI's delegation-first coding agent whose cloud mode runs each task in an isolated no-internet-by-default sandbox with the repo cloned, opens PRs, does automatic PR code review on GitHub and takes tasks from ChatGPT/Slack, bundled into ChatGPT Plus/Pro/Business with rolling credit-based billing since April 2026 (the CLI companion is open source, the cloud service is not).

Cloud / backgroundproprietarysubscription✓ mcpcontainer

Cosine (Genie) · Cosine

medium

YC-backed autonomous software engineer that picks up tickets from GitHub/Jira/Linear and opens tested PRs end-to-end across CLI, desktop, VS Code and cloud, distinguished by its own in-house Lumen model family (including on-device Scout and air-gapped sovereign variants for regulated industries like HSBC/NatWest/BAE) and the April 2026 'Swarm' feature for parallel long-horizon agents; credit-based seats at $20 (Hobby) and $200 (Professional).

Cloud / backgroundproprietarysubscription✓ local modelsoptional

Factory (Droids) · Factory AI

medium

Enterprise-focused 'Droids' platform ($1.5B valuation after April 2026 Series C): autonomous agents that execute refactors, migrations and incident investigations end-to-end across CLI, desktop, SDK and remote 'Droid Computers' cloud workloads, with both local and cloud background agents on the $20 Pro tier and adoption at Nvidia, Adobe, Morgan Stanley and MongoDB; notably model-agnostic across frontier providers.

Cloud / backgroundproprietarysubscription✓ mcpoptional
harnesses.sh — the agent harness directory