VocanicZ/Harness

One orchestrator, a pool of autonomous agents, all state in GitHub.
Harness drives a pool of agent CLI sessions (Claude Code by default) against a GitHub-issues board.
Workers claim dependency-ready issues, implement, audit, test and merge them, and file new issues
for any gap they find. All state lives in GitHub (issues, labels, pushed branches) plus a small local
run directory: no database, no daemon, resumable from any host.
You grill the idea once into a PRD; the fleet does the rest.
One fleet drives one repo. HARNESS_POOL is the number of parallel issues: each pool worker runs one issue at a time. A submodule is part of that repo: its issues are filed in the main repo with a ## Code location section, not in a fleet of their own.
## Features
| Feature | Chat agent | Agent loop | Harness |
| Runs unattended | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Parallel workers | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| PRD → issue breakdown | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Dependency ordering | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Independent review | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Targeted test selection | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Crash / limit recovery | ✗ | ◐ | ✓ |
| Resume on another host | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Steer mid-task | ✓ | ✗ | ◐ |
| Works without GitHub | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Zero setup | ✓ | ◐ | ✗ |
| Low token use | ✓ | ◐ | ✗ |
◐ partial. Harness steering is by injecting issues into a running fleet (/harness-issue).
Commit credit. Every commit an agent session makes ends with Co-authored-by: Harness , so GitHub shows the Harness avatar on it and lists Harness among the repo's contributors. It is added by a git wrapper on each lane's PATH, so it works for every agent CLI. Set HARNESS_COAUTHOR= (empty) in .harness/config or the environment to turn it off. Details: reference.
## Install
Ask your agent:
> install https://github.com/VocanicZ/Harness
Or run:
sh
npx -y github:VocanicZ/Harness
or, without Node:
sh
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/VocanicZ/Harness/main/install.sh | bash
Agents: run the npx line above, or the curl line when git is missing, and relay any missing prerequisites to the user.
Linux, macOS and native Windows are all first-class hosts: on Windows, run either line above from Git Bash. The same
features, skills, rtdd flow and install, update, rollback and uninstall lifecycle work there, with every agent CLI
(claude, codex, opencode, copilot, hermes, openclaw, agy) running its lanes on the headless session
backend, since Windows has no tmux. It is not a reduced mode, and WSL2 is optional (run the Linux instructions inside it
if you prefer). The Windows guide covers setup, daily use, the end-to-end smoke and troubleshooting;
the parity matrix lists every feature on both. Pin a release with
HARNESS_REF=v0.1.0.
| Prerequisite | |
| node ≥ 18 | runs the installer and adds rtdd, the lane test loop. Optional with the curl line, which needs bash and curl instead; lanes without rtdd run the closest test files by hand |
| git | the npx line only: npm fetches a github: package with git, so without it npx fails before the installer runs. The curl line offers to install it |
The installer offers to install the rest: git (with the curl line), tmux, python3, curl,
sha256sum, tar and gh with your package manager (apt-get, dnf, pacman, zypper, apk or brew),