A curated, verified, cross-vendor directory of AI agent harnesses — the runtime scaffolding that turns a model into an agent.
◆ 75 harnesses profiled · 9-axis capability schema · last verified 2026-07-08
Mario Zechner's radically minimal MIT/TypeScript harness (~68k stars): four tools (read/write/edit/bash), a ~300-word system prompt, deliberately no built-in MCP/subagents/permission-popups, with everything else added via TypeScript extensions, skills, and npm/git-shareable packages across interactive, print/JSON, RPC, and SDK modes.
A batteries-included 2026 fork of Pi (created Dec 31, 2025; ~17k stars) that inverts Pi's minimalism: hash-anchored edits that reject stale patches, LSP and DAP debugger integration, in-process ripgrep/bash, 40+ providers, 32 tools, and subagent orchestration.
Open-source (Rust, BSD-3) Codex-native personal agent platform whose defining trait is a hardware-isolated microVM per agent — Firecracker on Linux, Hyper-V on Windows, not just a container — wrapped in zero-trust controls: 'Pipelock' keeps secrets and credentials out of an agent's reach and an egress-allowlist proxy governs outbound traffic. Agents are authored, validated and launched entirely from Codex in-repo ('everything is a skill'), build their own capability-gated WASM tools at runtime, persist memory in a shared knowledge graph, and can run always-on via cron-style schedules and heartbeats.