Harness bought Augment’s coding agents. The best feature hasn’t shipped yet.

Harness, the software delivery platform, announced on Thursday that it has acquired Augment Code’s Cosmos software factory, Auggie CLI, and Code Context Engine along with their respective teams for an undisclosed sum. This acquisition expands Harness's capabilities by adding autonomous coding agents to its existing software development suite, which covers testing and deployment processes.

According to Harness, the Cosmos software factory will become the Harness Cosmos Software Factory Agent, with plans to integrate Augment’s codebase understanding into Harness's delivery history. However, the AI-powered coding agents' capabilities have not yet been released. Harness's founder and CEO, Jyoti Bansal, emphasized that AI's impact on software will be measured by its ability to deliver valuable software to customers rather than the amount of code generated.

The story follows Harness's research into the AI velocity paradox, which revealed that faster code generation was putting additional strain on testing and release processes. Cosmos operates by taking a requirement or bug report and transforming it into a pull request, with AI agents writing and testing code within isolated virtual machines.

These agents can also pick up on failed checks and review comments from previous rounds, using this feedback to make further improvements. Teams can customize agents for their specific workflows, while Augment's Code Context Engine retrieves relevant codebase context as needed. Despite the coding agents' progress, developers still approve and merge changes.

Bansal noted that teams can determine which tasks the agents handle independently and where human oversight is necessary. The integration of Augment’s Cosmos with Harness's Software Delivery Knowledge Graph will enable Cosmos to access deployment history and security findings when working on code changes. This integration will allow downstream agents to use repository context to troubleshoot and resolve failures.

When Harness's downstream agents identify an issue during testing, securing, or deploying code, they forward the issues back to Cosmos with the necessary context to resolve them. This approach streamlines the debugging process by bypassing the need for developers to diagnose and create separate tasks for each failure. The company has not specified a release date for the integration or detailed how the Code Context Engine and the delivery graph will exchange context, including how agents will retrieve relevant information from each system.

Harness plans to bring Cosmos under the identity and policy controls of its Agent Harness, but the company has not yet explained how permissions will function across the two systems. As the industry moves toward agent identity, such as Microsoft granting its Copilot agents individual identities, the limits of Cosmos' isolation become increasingly important.

Although Cosmos currently runs agents in isolated VMs with configurable review checkpoints, it remains unclear what production data the agents can access or the downstream actions they can perform. The limits of Cosmos' isolation warrant scrutiny, especially following instances where coding agents inadvertently exposed over 13,000 screenshots through routine workflows without being compromised.