AI harnesses
What form factors do AI harnesses come in?
AI harnesses come in three shapes: CLI agents live in the terminal and reward scripting, IDE agents work inside your editor with the lowest friction, and cloud or async agents run remotely so you can hand off a task and walk away.
Harnesses come in three shapes:
- CLI agents live in the terminal and reward scripting (Claude Code, Codex, Aider).
- IDE agents work inside your editor with inline diffs and the lowest friction (Cursor, Copilot).
- Cloud / async agents run on a remote machine, so you can hand off a task and walk away (Devin, OpenHands Cloud).