Harness Acquires Augment Code: Connecting AI Coding to Software Delivery

Harness (opens in a new tab) said it "has acquired select Augment Code assets, including Cosmos and the Auggie CLI products, the Code Context Engine, and related technology". The team behind these products will join Harness. The release describes Harness as the Autonomous SDLC Platform company.

Augment Code’s CEO, Matt McClernan, explained the decision in a post on the company’s blog (opens in a new tab): "We've agreed to sell these select assets because Harness's integrated platform delivers these capabilities to customers more effectively than building them independently." He added that the team is joining Harness "to expand the reach of our developer-focused coding capabilities and to continue working on our original mission: improving software development at scale using AI."

A focused asset acquisition

The deal brings over specific products and the people who build them: the Cosmos software factory, the Auggie CLI and the Code Context Engine. Cosmos becomes the Harness Cosmos Software Factory Agent, and Harness says it is available now.

Augment Code (opens in a new tab) is the company behind Cosmos, which Harness describes as "a programmable software factory that runs a fleet of AI agents taking engineering work from idea to merge-ready code". When a requirement is written, a ticket is assigned or a bug is logged, Cosmos agents plan the change, write the code and tests, and open a pull request.

Each agent works in its own isolated VM and brings in an engineer only where judgment is needed, such as approving a design or making the final merge. The agents run as a continuous loop through ticket, code and review: when a reviewer comments or a check flags an issue, an agent fixes the issue on the same pull request.

Teams can fork prebuilt Experts such as Project Builder, PR Author, Deep Reviewer and PR Fixer, tune each one to their own codebase and deploy it organisation-wide. Model routing matches each task to the right model, built-in integrations connect to GitHub, Jira and Slack, and shared memory carries lessons from each review into the next change.

Built for organisation-wide use

Versioning and budget controls let teams run autonomous coding across the entire engineering organisation. What leaves the factory, in Harness’s words, is "a reviewed pull request, ready for Harness agents to test, secure, and deploy".

Harness’s Software Delivery Knowledge Graph connects builds, deployments, infrastructure, security and costs. Augment’s Code Context Engine brings the same specificity to the code itself. Together, Harness says, they provide insights across the full SDLC: "what's being built, and what happens to it once it ships".

Before a change is written, Harness Cosmos will pull together the delivery context that should shape it, including test cases, security requirements, past incidents and their remediations. Once the change exists, Harness’s downstream agents will use codebase context to reason about dependencies, risk and the validation it needs. If an issue appears, the agents can loop until resolution.

Closing the loop

Bansal described the loop directly: "When Harness downstream agents identify an issue while testing, securing, or deploying code, they send it back to Cosmos with the context to fix it." Augment’s blog makes the same case from the other side, calling orchestrating, testing, verifying and deploying AI-generated code reliably across a platform "a bottleneck" that the infrastructure has to evolve to meet.

Harness gives Cosmos an established home. The company says on its company page (opens in a new tab) that it has more than 1,000 enterprise customers, more than 1,200 employees worldwide and $570M in total funding raised. It was launched in San Francisco in 2017.

The release names United Airlines, Morningstar and Choice Hotels among companies that use Harness "to accelerate releases by up to 75%, cut cloud costs by up to 60%, and improve efficiency by up to 10x". Harness is backed by Goldman Sachs, Menlo Ventures, IVP, Unusual Ventures and Citi Ventures.

Reach across existing teams

Ostrovsky pointed to the size of that installed base: "We've seen software factories transform how companies build software. Now, with Harness, that same transformation is within reach for every team already on the Harness platform — and every team getting started."

Harness says its integration vision focuses on "connecting Harness Cosmos workflows with the policies, permissions, and approvals that already govern the Harness platform, bringing the same discipline to creating a change that enterprises already expect when releasing one". Harness Cosmos (opens in a new tab) is available now.

What to watch

• –Adoption. Uptake of Harness Cosmos across Harness’s more than 1,000 enterprise customers, set out in the commercial case.
• –Governance. Cosmos workflows running under the platform’s policies, permissions and approvals.
• –The feedback loop. Downstream agents sending issues back to Cosmos, as described in Closing the loop.
• –Experts. New prebuilt Experts alongside Project Builder, PR Author, Deep Reviewer and PR Fixer.
• –Integrations. Cosmos’s connections to GitHub, Jira and Slack inside the Harness platform.
• –The Auggie CLI. How Augment’s command-line product develops inside Harness.