AI Agent Framework vs AI Agent Harness

Frameworks -> LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen

Harnesses -> Claude Code, Cursor, Codex

A framework helps “you” build agents.

A harness runs them.

Frameworks provide building blocks for creating AI Agents, like Tool calling, Memory management, Multi-agent patterns, etc.

So how is the harness different?

Harness has components that help AI Agents to achieve the goal. For example:

a) Dynamic Sub-Agents 

Harness provides an option to the parent AI Agent to create multiple dynamic sub-agents as per the task.

So, the developer doesn’t specify the number of agents. The parent agent decides on its own whether the task needs multiple sub agents and how many.

b) Context Management 

Over the period with multiple steps, context becomes larger and larger, harness manages the context by summarising the previous info and dropping irrelevant info

c) Session Persistence 

What happens if the process crashes before the goal is achieved? 

Therefore, the harness maintains the memory of the session

Maybe this would make things clearer

Framework helps “humans” to create AI Agents

While

Harness helps “AI Agent” to achieve the goal set by the human.

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