Harness bought Augment’s coding agents. The best feature hasn’t shipped yet.
The New Stack Amanda Caswell
Harness bought Augment’s coding agents and team. The big idea is to use deployment history to fix code, but that part hasn’t shipped yet.
Based on reporting by The New Stack, Amanda Caswell — read the original for the full story.
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Harness said Thursday that it has acquired Augment Code’s Cosmos software factory, Auggie CLI, Code Context Engine, and the team behind them for an undisclosed sum. The immediate effect is simple: Harness gets autonomous coding agents to bolt onto a platform that already handles testing and deployment.
The more interesting part is the promise Harness says is coming later. Cosmos, which will be renamed the Harness Cosmos Software Factory Agent, is supposed to tap into Harness’s delivery history so agents can see past deployment failures while they make changes. If a downstream check breaks, the failure would flow back to the coding agent instead of landing on a developer’s desk as a fresh task. Nice theory. Not shipped yet.
Harness founder and CEO Jyoti Bansal framed the deal around his company’s AI velocity paradox research, which found that faster code generation was putting more pressure on testing and release processes that hadn’t kept up. That fits the pitch here: the problem isn’t writing code faster. It’s getting good software out the door without turning the rest of the pipeline into a bottleneck.
Augment’s system already works through a requirement or bug report all the way to a pull request, with agents writing and testing code inside isolated VMs. It can also take failed checks and review comments on an existing pull request, then revise the work based on that feedback. Teams can fork and tune the agents for their own workflows, while the Code Context Engine pulls in relevant codebase context as they work.
Humans still have the final say. Developers approve and merge changes, though Bansal said teams can choose which jobs agents handle alone and where a person must review or approve. Cosmos is still available through Augment’s site for now, and Harness has not set a release date for the integration or explained how context will actually move between the Code Context Engine and the delivery graph.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the right bet, and it’s also the part most AI coding vendors dodge: code generation is cheap; clean handoff into testing, deployment, and failure triage is the real work. The missing permissions details matter more than the demo, because “agentic” is a lovely word right up until someone asks what the agent can actually touch.
Read more about this at: The New Stack