$ find your agent harness

MIT-licensed self-hosted personal AI assistant ('the lobster way') that exploded to ~382k GitHub stars in months: any model, 20+ messaging channels (WhatsApp/Telegram/Slack/iMessage...), SKILL.md skills via ClawHub, Docker-sandboxed sessions, cron jobs, voice, and a live Canvas.

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.

Formerly OpenDevin, the leading open-source autonomous software-engineering platform: Docker-sandboxed agents that write code, run commands, browse, and open PRs, with a production agent SDK hitting 72% on SWE-bench Verified (Claude Sonnet 4.5) and its own broader OpenHands Index benchmark launched Jan 2026.

MIT-licensed Python framework (~55k stars) for role-based multi-agent 'Crews' plus event-driven 'Flows', with unified memory, hierarchical delegation, and a commercial AMP cloud platform (free tier, Pro from ~$25/mo, enterprise) that CrewAI says powered ~2B agentic executions in the year to January 2026.

The original open deep-research harness (Apache-2.0, 28k stars): a planner/executor multi-agent pipeline that fans out parallel web and local-document searches into cited reports, with recursive tree-like 'Deep Research', MCP data-source integration, and any-LLM support.

The leading TypeScript agent framework (Apache 2.0 core since July 2025; some enterprise features commercial) offering agents, type-safe workflows with suspend/resume human-in-the-loop, memory, a unified router to 3,300+ models across ~94 providers, guardrails/scorers/tracing, Mastra Studio for interactive testing, and file-based agent definitions added July 2026.

Apache-2.0 platform for stateful agents descended from MemGPT, distinguished by tiered self-editing memory persisted in a database (core memory in-context, archival out-of-context) plus 2026 research on git-based 'Context Repositories' and memory-native RL; in 2026 the company is consolidating around Letta Code, an open, model-agnostic memory-first coding agent harness (LettaBot archived May 2026 and folded in as Channels).

Sourcegraph's opinionated no-model-picker coding agent (CLI + VS Code extension), distinguished by curated multi-model design with specialized subagents (Oracle for reasoning, Librarian for library research), Toolboxes (UNIX-script custom tools), skills with bundled MCP servers, and an ad-supported free mode alongside zero-markup pay-as-you-go credits.

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.

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).

The original 'AI software engineer': a cloud VM agent that plans, codes, tests and opens PRs from Slack/web/API, now spanning a whole product line (Devin cloud, Devin Desktop nee Windsurf, CLI) with ACU consumption billing ($2.00-2.25/ACU, Core $20 entry, Team $500/mo) and Cognition's own SWE-1.6 model alongside frontier models.

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).

Anthropic's cloud-hosted Claude Code at claude.ai/code: each session gets an isolated Anthropic-managed VM with the GitHub repo cloned and limited default network access, supports parallel steerable sessions across repos with automatic PR creation, sessions persist after browser close and are monitorable from the Claude mobile app; bundled with Pro/Max/Team/Enterprise plans (research preview).

Google's asynchronous coding agent that clones your GitHub repo into a secure cloud VM, plans and executes tasks (bug fixes, tests) and returns PRs; free tier of 15 tasks/day with higher quotas bundled into Google AI Pro/Ultra, Gemini 3.1 Pro/3 Flash under the hood, curated MCP connections (Linear, Supabase, Neon, Context7) added Feb 2026 and an alpha REST API for Slack/Linear-driven automation.

GitHub's fully autonomous background worker: assign it a GitHub Issue and it works in a GitHub Actions-powered sandbox and delivers a draft PR, with MCP server support, custom .agent.md agents, agentic code review that hands fixes back to the agent, and (since Feb 2026) the ability to assign the same issue to Claude, Codex and Copilot simultaneously and pick the best PR; available on Pro through Enterprise with AI-credit billing from June 2026.

Cursor's fire-and-forget mode (formerly Background Agents): agents run in isolated cloud Ubuntu VMs — since Feb 2026 with a full desktop and browser for 'computer use' UI verification — clone the repo onto their own branch, work multi-repo in parallel, report back to the IDE/web/Slack/Teams/iOS app, and open PRs, with Dockerfile-configurable environments, scoped secrets, and a headless Background Agent API.

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.

OpenAI's built-in agent mode that absorbed Operator and Deep Research: a cloud virtual computer with browser, terminal, and connectors that researches, fills forms, and edits files, pausing for user approval on consequential actions and handing back control for logins/payments.

Anthropic's non-technical desktop agent built on the Claude Code harness (no terminal required) that works over local folders, browsers (Claude in Chrome), and full computer use, with MCP connectors, Agent Skills, and plugins — expanded to web and mobile in July 2026 with cloud-run sessions for Max subscribers.

Google's successor lineage to Project Mariner (shut down as a standalone May 2026): Gemini Agent plus the I/O 2026 'Gemini Spark', a 24/7 always-on personal agent on dedicated cloud machines with deep Gmail/Workspace integration, MCP tool support, and check-before-acting guardrails, gated to AI Ultra ($100/mo) beta.