What is an agent harness?
A model answers; an agent acts. An agent harness is the runtime that turns one into the other — the model thinks; the harness decides what that thinking is allowed to touch.
Every prior wave of automation was constrained by brittleness: you scripted exact behavior, and when the world deviated, the system broke. Foundation models inverted that problem—they're flexible but directionless, stateless, and disconnected from anything real. The agent harness exists to bridge that gap: it is the orchestration infrastructure that converts a model's per-turn reasoning into sustained, tool-using, error-recovering, goal-directed behavior across time. Architecturally, it plays the role the kernel played in operating systems or the controller played in industrial robotics—mediating between raw capability and a messy environment—but with a critical difference: the "capability" it governs is general-purpose cognition, which means the harness is simultaneously a scheduler, a permission system, a memory manager, and a policy enforcement layer, all under-specified and evolving in real time.
Why harnesses matter
Better models make harnesses more important: more capabilities mean more failure modes, and production needs retry logic, fallbacks, and validation. Harness quality—not just model quality—determines whether agents actually ship. This list ranks projects by relevance to harness concerns (environment, orchestration, lifecycle, guardrails) and by stars/activity.
The landscape at a glance
Every project in the list, plotted by adoption surface area (the simplicity ↔ capability axis) against GitHub stars. Colors are categories; the largest projects in each tier are labeled.
The same projects placed by how much unsupervised rope they're designed to give (autonomy) and what happens when a run dies (recovery). In the tables below, ★ marks headless-ready projects and ✱ marks durable ones. Both charts regenerate from the list data on every refresh.
How to Pick a Harness
Start with the guide, then the head-to-head decision pages — grounded in the same data as the tables below:
- How to pick a harness — six questions that turn this list into a decision, including the post–June 2026 billing reality
- OpenClaw vs Hermes — the always-on personal-agent debate: presence vs discipline, plus what the field reports actually say
- Terminal coding agents — opencode vs Codex vs Gemini CLI vs crush vs goose
- Multi-agent orchestration — OpenAI Agents SDK vs CrewAI vs AutoGen vs LangGraph
- Agent memory layers — Mem0 vs Letta vs claude-mem
Pick by use case
Reader's index: pick by what you want to do, not by category. Tag chips (e.g. mcp · memory) next to each row let you cross-filter by capability — see TAGS.md for the full cross-reference.
- I want a turnkey coding agent today — opencode, Cline, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenHands, crush, Roo Code · see Coding agent products (IDEs, CLIs, full suites)
- I want an always-on personal agent that lives in my chat apps — OpenClaw, Hermes, Khoj, Agent Zero, OpenHarness (HKUDS) · see Personal agent runtimes
- I want to extend Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode with skills and slash commands — Anthropic Skills, everything-claude-code, superpowers, GStack, pmstack · see Coding harness configs and SDKs
- I want to build my own coding harness from scratch — Claude Agent SDK, Google ADK, AutoHarness, SWE-agent, RepoMaster, claw-code-agent · see Coding harness configs and SDKs
- I want a drop-in memory layer for agents — Mem0, claude-mem, agentlog, agno, letta · see Plugins, MCPs, CLI tools
- I want to plug hundreds to thousands of tools without context bloat — MCP-Zero, ToolGen, ToolRAG, langgraph-bigtool, spring-ai-tool-search-tool · see Progressive disclosure harnesses
- I want multi-agent orchestration — openai-agents-python, crewAI, autogen, Microsoft Agent Framework, PraisonAI, agent-squad · see Multi-agent and orchestration
- I want a general LLM app framework — langgraph, langchain, llama-index, pydantic-ai, agno · see Frameworks
- I want low-code / visual workflows — langflow, Flowise, Dify, n8n · see Frameworks
- I want browser-using agents — browser-use, WebVoyager, puppeteer-real-browser-mcp · see Plugins, MCPs, CLI tools
- I want sandboxed code execution for agent-generated code — E2B, Daytona, smolagents, OpenHands · see Libraries and SDKs
- I want to evaluate or benchmark agents — SWE-bench, AgencyBench, inspect_ai, WebArena, ARC-AGI-2, VitaBench · see Evaluation and benchmarking harnesses
- I want a deep research / autonomous research agent — deepagents, gpt-researcher, openagents · see Research and task-specific harnesses
- I want a provider-agnostic LLM pipe (not a framework) — LiteLLM, vercel/ai · see Libraries and SDKs
For agents
This list is also published in machine-readable form, so coding agents and research agents can recommend harnesses — not just humans browsing GitHub:
- harnesses.json — every project with category, complexity tier, capability tags, stars, license signal, and a concrete example link, plus the full use-case index.
- llms.txt — the entire list in one agent-readable file. Point any agent at